Format problem

[Guest]

Somehow my formatting appears to be defaulting to time. Everytime I copy
formulas or data from one cell to another the format changes to time. How do
you stop this from happening?

 

[Dave O]

If you land the cell pointer on a particular cell and cut-and-paste,
then the format of the original cell will follow to the pasted cell.
If you're encountering "phantom" formats then the cell may have been
previously formatted. I tried to get a blank sprdsht to behave in the
manner you describe, and couldn't.

 

[Dave O]

My error: this often happens to me when using cells formatted as dates
or times. To me it's more bug than feature.

 

[Guest]

Dave,
Checked that and the original cell was formated as general. Maybe I could
email you a page out of my spreadsheet?

 

[Dave O]

Gary-
I think this is a case of Excel trying to be helpful: the software
realizes you're working with dates, and assumes that if you are
entering a formula that references date cells then *naturally* you want
the results cell to format as dates too, right?!?! I don't know of a
way to disable this "feature", and unfortunately AFAIK (and I could be
wrong) the only workaround is to reformat the results cell.

Dave O