Any chance that you toggled the sheet into "formula" view.

<Tools <Options <View tab,
And *UNCHECK* "Formulas".

The toggle is
<Ctrl <`
That's a single quote, which on my keyboard, is above the <Tab key and
under the <Esc key.
--

HTH,

RD
==============================================
Please keep all correspondence within the Group, so all may benefit!
==============================================

"Seth" wrote in message
...
Thanks for the attempt BJB, but I don't think I phrased my question well. I
have a spreadsheet with thousands of dates, all entered in mm/dd/yyyy
format.
Yesterday, I hit something on the keyboard, or a menu item, or something...
and every date in the spreadsheet changed to a five digit number. I realize
that Excel stores dates as numbers, and then just displays them as
mm/dd/yyyy
when you ask it too. However, I can't get it to display them that way; no
matter what I do in this spreadsheet, they display as five digit numbers.
Hopefully that cleared it up a little.

Thanks again,

"BJB" wrote:

You could always try just formatting the cell as text and then enter the
date
as mm/dd/yyyy. Or maybe I am not getting what you are asking.

"Seth" wrote:

Hello,

This is a simple question I think. I have an Excel worksheet that is
displaying dates in the Excel standard date format (five digit number).
However, when I click on a cell, the date is displayed in m/d/yyyy
format in
the formula bar. How do I get Excel to display it that way in the
worksheet???

Note that the cells are formatted as date, with mm/dd/yy selected.

Thanks,
Seth