Board 8 > Excel 2007 help

(+) Yeah! (+)

Yeah, it's not ideal that I only have Excel 2007 at work, but...

I've been working on a project where the formatting for certain columns keep changing to "date" without my permission. I've tried protecting the formatting of the sheets, and it didn't help. The formatting is still changing many of the cells to "date". I'm guessing part of the reason I'm having this issue is because there are a lot of tabs/data.

Are there any tricks I could try to prevent this from happening? Or should I just switch to Google Docs?
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Excel 2007... https://i.imgur.com/caUt8mL.gif

Hmmm.... is the issue that you're taking numbers from somewhere else and pasting them in but they're pasting as dates instead of their native format? Even though you've already done "Format Cells" to be a non-date format?

Or is it that you got these numbers and they look normal/properly formatted but for whatever reason (after you make an edit, or close & open the file) they're suddenly changing to date format?

The latter. It's not connected to copy/pasting. The format only changes when I leave worksheet and then come back to it. (either moving to another tab or closing the file, then coming back to it)
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@Steiner @WiggumFan267
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Oh wow. Yeah I got nothing, that's messed up.

The only thing I can think, when I was dealing with a file that was doing weird things that I couldn't fix, was literally starting over. Fresh workbook, add in the old data (paste special values), formulas and formatting so it all looks the same. I think I had to do that a few times in Excel but it was mostly a Word problem.

I tried googling and there were some comments that it's a corrupt file issue...

Okay this is one thing that somebody said here: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/ie/en-US/bbda28fa-51b2-4d25-9256-29c10a64c7d5/excel-2007-changes-cell-formats-by-itself-at-random

Click on cell styles in the Home ribbon.
Right click on "Normal"
Click Modify
Click Format
Change format to General

This worked for me.

And more than a few posts saying that solved the issue for them.... but if "cell styles" is just what Format Cells was called back in that version then it's probably not a real solution? I forget all the past Excel iterations. My googling also turned up people saying that had the same problem even when starting from scratch but I like to think it wasn't fully from scratch and they copied-over whatever the old problem was to their new version...

Yeah, I tried the "starting over with a fresh sheet" idea a few days ago, and no luck.

But that last idea.... I'll see if that might help! This might be just the thing I need. If I have the same problem, but columns now change to "General" instead of "Date", I could live with that. Thanks!
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Hey, don't thank me until it works out...! And ideally the summoned Wigs or Steiner will have other possible solutions. Always glad to help when it comes to Excel though.

Ugh, I had this bug happen to a large project at work like three years ago. I can't remember the details of what I did unfortunately. That solution concerning the cell styles sounds really familiar.

I also vaguely remember writing a macro that purged all the custom cell formats on workbook open.
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Tag
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Raka_Putra posted...

Tag

Whatever floats your boat. >_>
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It's a gripping tale, he wants to see if there's a resolution

I mean, I don't want this to end on a cliffhanger either!

is the file saved as a proper excel 2003-2007 file format? file formats can overwrite formulas and formatting if it doesn't like them.

a very clear example is if you open something as a csv and then do a ton of formulas across a lot of tabs and then save and come back later to one tab with everything as values.....
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MartinFF7 posted...

It's a gripping tale, he wants to see if there's a resolution

I mean, I don't want this to end on a cliffhanger either!

Yeah, and this sounds like something I might encounter one day.
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I almost forgot about this. Ever since trying that last trick, I've had no problems since. Thanks again, Martin.

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Hell yeah!

https://i.imgur.com/LPR47wT.gif

I found my old copy of Excel 2003 that I'm going to install for my parents on their computer when I visit at Christmas, I wonder if Windows 10 will refuse it but hopefully not. That's definitely gonna take me back to old school Excel...

Ha, my personal computer is still running Excel 2007, but my work computer has been updated to Office 365.

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