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Excel 2010 spontaneously formats entire work book in date format

M

MalR

Member
Hi guys. I notice some threads on other sites about this but none were helpful.
I have a large file with many worksheets. There are lookups, macros, plus many other formulas in them but no pivot tables. I did the usual save last night and on opening today all my numbers had been reformatted to d/mm/yyyy. Every worksheet! It is a huge job to fix manually. It never happened before and no one else used the pc and I have not made any new formulas etc for days. Just magic by our good friends at MS.
I checked the cell styles but could not see how I could fix this.
I am hoping to fix it via the template or by highlighting the worksheets and reformatting rather than have another macro to do this.
I use office 2010 and Win7, 64 bit.
Is this problem easy to fix?
Thanks for your help
MalR
 
From Microsoft: ...not just 2010...
This bug has been posted in many forums. Apparently, the number format in the NORMAL style spontaneously changes from General to this date format ([$-409]m/d/yy h:mm AM/PM;@). This typically happens in shared workbooks, but I have seen it happen in one of my workbooks...which was not shared.

A change to the NORMAL style impacts every cell that has not been specifically formatted, the end result is seemingly devastating. The fix for any particular workbook, however, is relatively easy.

To resolve that issue:
• Home.Cell_Styles
...Right-click: NORMAL...Select: Modify
...Click the Format button
...Number_Tab....Category: General

To my knowledge Microsoft has not addressed this XL2007 issue via an update or patch.

This is too little, too late advice, but I keep two thumb drives and alternate each day between the two so if something like you experience rears its ugly head, I'm not completely stuck.

See also: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...3af-ecee-41fa-866a-2590343a111d?page=1&auth=1
 
Last edited:
Thanks Whatever. You are a life saver! I spent hours manually reformatting. This proved to be an immediate fix.
Merry Xmas!
MalR
 
Thanks Eloise! I was searching for a fix for this and this really helped. By the way, will this fix only the current workbook, or every excel file I create from now on?
 
I'm not
Jorge Martinez said:
Thanks Eloise! I was searching for a fix for this and this really helped. By the way, will this fix only the current workbook, or every excel file I create from now on?
Click to expand...
I'm sorry, I've been out of the office for a couple of weeks.

To answer your question: I'm not certain. You probably have experimented by now and know the answer?
 
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