I have a spread sheet that was formatted for dates and was working fine. I
turned the keyboard over and now my date column has numbers, ie 38717. If
you highlight the cell you do see the date at the top. I have tried
formatting and text to columns, but I cannot get it to show the date in the
column. This is true for all columns that have date shown or any new columns
I create for dates. When I do try to format there is an * before the date
type and the information at the bottom indicates it will change all to date
values except for items that have an asterisk, but it doesn't tell me how to
get rid of the asterisk. I also tried to change to other types instead of
12/31/05, but that also was unsuccessful. Any comments appreciated.

Normally, just reformatting the column to DATE will work. With XL2003, I
input 38717 in a cell, then formated as DATE and got the date. I then
reformatted the same cell as TEXT, it reverted to 38717, then formatted as
DATE .. all O.K.

How are the cells cuurently formatted?

"spohar" wrote:

I have a spread sheet that was formatted for dates and was working fine. I
turned the keyboard over and now my date column has numbers, ie 38717. If
you highlight the cell you do see the date at the top. I have tried
formatting and text to columns, but I cannot get it to show the date in the
column. This is true for all columns that have date shown or any new columns
I create for dates. When I do try to format there is an * before the date
type and the information at the bottom indicates it will change all to date
values except for items that have an asterisk, but it doesn't tell me how to
get rid of the asterisk. I also tried to change to other types instead of
12/31/05, but that also was unsuccessful. Any comments appreciated.

When you turned your keyboard over, you hit the ctrl-` (control-backquote, to
the left of the 1/! key on my USA keyboard).

This is the shortcut to show formulas.

Hit it again to toggle back or
tools|options|view tab|uncheck formulas


And stop playing with the keyboard!!! <vbg

spohar wrote:

I have a spread sheet that was formatted for dates and was working fine. I
turned the keyboard over and now my date column has numbers, ie 38717. If
you highlight the cell you do see the date at the top. I have tried
formatting and text to columns, but I cannot get it to show the date in the
column. This is true for all columns that have date shown or any new columns
I create for dates. When I do try to format there is an * before the date
type and the information at the bottom indicates it will change all to date
values except for items that have an asterisk, but it doesn't tell me how to
get rid of the asterisk. I also tried to change to other types instead of
12/31/05, but that also was unsuccessful. Any comments appreciated.

--

Dave Peterson