Thanks for responding Dave !

+1 appears in the formula bar. Here is the sequence of events...

I open a new blank workbook.
I select cell A1
I hit the negative key -
I hit the number one 1
The number changes to a positive one +1
and then reads as 1
It is as if excel will not accept negative numbers or it is converting - to
positive as if i were using the abs function...but i am not. I use excel for
office 97 at work all day long and I have not seen this before. This is my
mother's computer and she is running Excel 2002. I tried holding down the
shift key when starting excel to prevent Macros from running but that did not
work. I have looked at conditional formatting, deleting all default templates
and the absolute function but none of these seem to be the problem. I may
just re-install Office to see if that does the trick. Please respond !

I tried
"Dave Peterson" wrote:

After the number turns positive, what do you see in the formula bar for that
cell?

If it still shows negative there, then maybe it's just a formatting problem.

Format|cells|number tab|make it general.

If it really shows positive, then it sounds like you may have a macro that's
helping out.

Can you reopen your workbook with macros disabled and see what happens?

Jerri wrote:

When I try to enter a negative number into excel, the number turns positive
as soon as I enter it. I have tried deleting book1.xlt to remove any bogus
formatting but this problem appears to be some sort of default setting that I
do not know about.

--

Dave Peterson