Yes, garbage in and out. Which leads to a question
I thought of after I sent my last response. Will Excel
warn the user if he enters an incompatible format into
a column that is designated as date format? Apparently
not, since it allowed entry of bad date values in my
spreadsheet, in which I had set the format to be date
in the format dialog.

Do you know of any capability built into Excel to do
data entry warnings, or perhaps any code that will
parse entries and check for format errors?

Thanks,

B.C.