Thanks much. Panic relieved:-)
--
Cheryl


"Roger Govier" wrote:

Hi Cheryl

Excel stores dates internally as the number of days since 01/01/1900 and
it is merely the formatting of the cell in the manner you choose that
will display either 05/09/2006 or 05 Sep 2006 (UK settings)

If you have formatted a cell FormatCellsDate and then enter a number
like you have, Excel interpret that number a date that number of days
ahead of 01/01/1900 as you have found.
If you format the cell as General, then enter 090406, Excel will display
90406 as a number (leading zeros will be dropped).

You cannot enter dates by just typing in the manner you have tried
(unless you have an event code written in VBA to convert your entry),
you have to enter the date in one of the approved date formats.

So, don't worry that you have messed anything up, you haven't
If you want to speed up your data entry of dates, then having formatted
the cells as Date, you could just type 5/9 (or 9/5 in your case) and
Excel will assume that you mean the current year and will take the entry
as 05/09/2006 (09/05/2006).

Hope this helps.

--
Regards

Roger Govier


"Cheryl" wrote in message
...
I seem to have messed up my date formatting in Excel. Have to confess
that I
fiddled with the date checkboxes under the Calculations tab in
Options. Now
when I type a date such as 090406 in any cell, any workbook and try to
format
it as a date, it seems to be adding 90406 to 1/1/1900, and formatting
the
date accordingly. In other words, the above is being interpreted as
7/9/2147. However, if I type it in as 9/4/06, it formats it
correctly.

I am afraid to open any files where I have used dates in calculations
because they may become corrupted.

Can anyone out there help?

P.S. Let this be a warning against messing around when you don't know
what
your doing!
--
Cheryl