Why are my column headings numbers?

[TotallyConfused]

This morning when I loaded Excel 2010 with Vista, the same as I’ve always used, I noticed that all my column headings have changed from the usual letters to numbers. This is in an empty Excel. I thought maybe loading the program I've been developing would bring everything back to normal, however, even with my program loaded, all columns are now labeled with numbers. When I had this same program loaded last night, everything was fine. I’ve looked through the Excel help files but haven’t found anything that even talks about this. Is there anyone that can explain what I happened to do that caused this change? How can I get my column letters back?

As an added bit of information, let’s say I have the cursor on the cell in the third row and in the fifth column, which should be labeled column ‘E’, it will show my location as ‘R3C5’.

What I also find strange, is that as an experiment, I tried running the following simple VBA command from my program. It is: .Range(C11:L50”).ClearContents and it worked, even with the numbered columns.

I will appreciate any help you may be able to offer. I have no idea how I could code anything with only numbers instead of numbers and letters. Thank you in advance.

 

[Trevor G]

To change back to letters, select File and then Options --> Click the Formuals --> In the second group deselect R1C1 Style, this will revert back to Letters and your formula's will update as well.

 

[TotallyConfused]

To change back to letters, select File and then Options --> Click the Formuals --> In the second group deselect R1C1 Style, this will revert back to Letters and your formula's will update as well.

Hi Trevor

WOW! It worked! THANK YOU ever so much. Thanks also for your clear, concise instructions on what I needed to do. You have no idea how happy I was to see ‘A B C’ across my screen instead of those numbers. I’ve had visions of having to try to reload Excel or having a program that I’ve worked on for quite a while that I couldn’t complete. I can honestly say you sure made my day this morning.

Would there be any advantage to having the numbers up there instead of letters? I can see if a person had a larger worksheet with multiple character column headings, it might be easier if using a formula such as VLOOKUP to know what column number to look in.

Thanks again.
TotallyConfused (still)

 

[Trevor G]

Happy to help and pleased to read it has helped you.

There can be many reasons for switching from Letters to Numbers, it helps me when I am in VBA trying to work out Column numbers for Filtering and a few other things to.

Most important you now know you can do that and also switch back.

Thanks for letting me know it helped.