This is driving me nuts!

I use excel 2000.

From time to time certain cells (usually blocks of cells or an entire
row) containing numerical data lose all formatting. Excel no longer
recognizes the data as numbers and will not sort them etc. Selecting
the cell(s) and changing the formatting has no effect. Copying, then
"paste special / values" only works sometimes. Manually retyping the
data over the old usually works but I am dealing with a spreadsheet
with about 1000 records.

I just had this happen with a row containing date / time stamps.
Each cell has an entry like "7/26/04 9:53". I can usually change the
formatting of this info to display just the date just the time etc. Now
I can do nothing with them. It's like Excel thinks the cells contain
plain text.

I did notice that selecting a single cell, then placing the cursor in
the formula bar, then pressing enter will bring that one cell back to
life, but this is not practical for 1000 records.

Any ideas?


--
BdgBill
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Bill

Check this out

http://www.nickhodge.co.uk/tipstrick...gTextToNumbers

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
HIS


"BdgBill" wrote in message
...

This is driving me nuts!

I use excel 2000.

From time to time certain cells (usually blocks of cells or an entire
row) containing numerical data lose all formatting. Excel no longer
recognizes the data as numbers and will not sort them etc. Selecting
the cell(s) and changing the formatting has no effect. Copying, then
"paste special / values" only works sometimes. Manually retyping the
data over the old usually works but I am dealing with a spreadsheet
with about 1000 records.

I just had this happen with a row containing date / time stamps.
Each cell has an entry like "7/26/04 9:53". I can usually change the
formatting of this info to display just the date just the time etc. Now
I can do nothing with them. It's like Excel thinks the cells contain
plain text.

I did notice that selecting a single cell, then placing the cursor in
the formula bar, then pressing enter will bring that one cell back to
life, but this is not practical for 1000 records.

Any ideas?


--
BdgBill
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BdgBill's Profile:
http://www.excelforum.com/member.php...fo&userid=7120
View this thread: http://www.excelforum.com/showthread...hreadid=320497