Never Mind! Somehow, I had hit a shortcut key that displayed all formulas.
I turned this off in tools/options and the dates displayed fine.

"rah44" wrote:

I am trying to format a date in a cell. The date within the cell reads
9/10/07, but 39335 is displayed on-screen. I know the standard procedure on
how to change the format of a cell to date/ number etc., but there is
definitely something wrong here. I have tried formatting the cells to
different things, but the cell continues to read this same data stream.