no mystery. what is displayed depends on the formatting used. so a date is
saved as a long number , like 39902 and you can format it to show "DDD" or
"dd-mmm-yyyy"
numbers are the same. 123.456 can be formatted "#.0" and you'll see 123.5

as for editing, if you select all three cells hit F2 and then ctrl-Enter,
the same value will go into all three cells.

all your java app is doing is reading the cell content ...and if its a date,
you'll need to make the conversion.
Always ise CSV files is the recommended way - WYSIWYG - so dates look like
dates and not numbers

"Anand Nichkaode" wrote in
message ...
Hi,

I have a workbook, (Excel 97-2003) format, with values in three cells. All
of the three cells display the same value i.e. $74,523.38. And the same
value
is displayed in the formula bar upon clicking the cells.

But when my java program tries to read the workbook and the cell values,
with JXL API, the value read for the cell A1 and A2 is 74532.374999999971
and
for A3 is 74532.375.

Now I press F2 in the cells and save the workbook without changing
anything.
When java reads this workbook the values read for all the cells is
74532.375.

There seems to be something happening when the cell is edited. Also there
seems to be some mistery around the way the cell values are displayed and
they are stored internally by Excel.

Also I converted this file to Excel 2007 and checked the XML for the
worksheet and found out that Excel stored 74532.374999999971 as value for
A1
and A2 cells and 74532.375 as value for A3 cell.

Does anybody has faced anything like this? Any help is appreciated.

-Thx
Anand