Weird Excel date formatting problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ian D
  • Start date Start date
I

Ian D

OS= XP Pro SP2 all updates in.

Just installed Office 2003 with SP2 update. In Excel I want to use
dates in the month-day format (Oct-20), so I highlighted my date
column and used Format/Cells/Date to apply the month-day
format. The dates format properly, but all days revert to 05,
i.e. Sep-30 enters as Sep-05, Oct-10 as Oct-05, etc. What could cause this?
Tried a blank cell in a new sheet with no change.

If I use Format/Style/Modify/Date, the dates enter correctly, but
all 5 digit numbers in the sheet change to dates, obviously the
date equivalents of the numerical values. How do I stop this?
 
Is there any chance that when you "...used Format/Cells/Date to apply
the month-day | format..." that you did "mmm-yy" instead of "mmm-dd"?
Rgds,
ScottO

| OS= XP Pro SP2 all updates in.
|
| Just installed Office 2003 with SP2 update. In Excel I want to use
| dates in the month-day format (Oct-20), so I highlighted my date
| column and used Format/Cells/Date to apply the month-day
| format. The dates format properly, but all days revert to 05,
| i.e. Sep-30 enters as Sep-05, Oct-10 as Oct-05, etc. What could
cause this?
| Tried a blank cell in a new sheet with no change.
|
| If I use Format/Style/Modify/Date, the dates enter correctly, but
| all 5 digit numbers in the sheet change to dates, obviously the
| date equivalents of the numerical values. How do I stop this?
|
|
 
Thanks Scott,

Yes, that's the problem. I assumed the drop down list example
Mar-01 was mmm-dd, but in fact it's mmm-yy. If they had Mar-99
it would have been obvious. The interesting thing is that in
the Style/Modify/Date dialog I used Mar-01 and it allowed my
dates as mmm-dd, but all 5 digit numerical cells changed to
dates even though they were formatted as 5 digit.2 decimal.
 
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