Has anyone ever had a problem where Excel 2010 will change numbers that may be formatted as General, Currency, Dates or Times just change all the numbers so they display as "12:00 AM" and formatted as Time? And then when you look in the formula bar, it will display both a date and time, but they're dates like 4/12/1909 or 8/24/2139. It's just goofy. So then you highlight the entire column, and change the formatting to GENERAL, and the original numbers that were typed in display just fine. Why is this happening? It's happening on more than one document, and the user says it's been happening since she's been upgraded to Excel 2010. Some of her data is fine, and then others are not. She is saving her files into the new .xlsx format. Any suggestions?????
I've attached a file so you can see what I'm talking about. Look at columns I and J. The original file had more worksheets in it, but I deleted those.
Experts-exchange-file.xlsx
In order to prevent Excel from converting your numbers into dates you must enter them as Text. Individually, you can do that by preceding each entry with an apostrophe. The apostrophe will not be displayed but Excel will treat the number as text and, therefore, not change it into a date. Collectively, you can change the number format to Text (not General) for the entire column. Unfortunately, you have to do this before Excel has done its conversion trick.