Tom:

That was the problem.

Thanks

Tom Ogilvy wrote:
Suspect your SSN's are stored as text rather than numbers. You can test by
selecting the column and do

Edit=Goto=Special and select Constants and Text. If it selects all your
SSN's then that is the problem.

You need to format the cells as General, then do

Data=Text to Columns, select delimited and select tab as the delimiter.
This will cause excel to reevaluate your SSN's and change them to numbers.
Then your format should work.