Ridiculous date format problem

[sarcastress]

I feel like I'm losing my mind because I've never had this happen to me before. I'm trying to format a column as dates. Simple as that. I formatted the column before typing anything in, and then I typed in 6/9/2011 in the first cell and it displays as 40703. It shows 6/9/2011 in the formula bar, but no matter what I do, I cannot get it to format the column as dates.

Oh, and it won't format it correctly as any other format, either. If I format it as a number with two decimal places, it still displays 40703. If I format it as a percentage, it displays 40703. If I format it as time, it displays 40703 (6/9/2011 12:00:00 in the formula bar).

Are there pixies in my computer? Why in the world would this happen?

 

[Bagharmin]

It's possible you could have "Show Formulas" turned on. Click the "Formulas" tab (in Excel 2007) and look in the "Formula Auditing" section for "Show Formulas" and see if it's highlighted. If it is, click it and you should be able to format as normal.