When I type
Jan 06
in a cell, I get January 6th, of the current year.
Is that what you meant?
I've found it's always better to fully type the date in the cell (year, month
and day).
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And formatting a cell only changes the way you see what's in that cell. The
actual value doesn't change.
And to excel, a date is just a number of days from a starting date. Usually
it's the number of days since December 31, 1899 (for wintel users).
I've never seen dates that change to general, though.
If you don't get a good answer here, you may want to try the .charting
newsgroup.