Excel is...ahem..."helping". It assumes you intended to enter a date, so it
converts your date-like input to an Excel date-serial number.

To Excel, each date is represented by the number of days the date is after
31-DEC-1899.
For example:
01-JAN-1900 is date-serial 1
11-MAR-2008 is date-serial 39,518

To avoid the conversion:
1) Enter an apostrophe (') before the entered value: '1-4-1
or
2) Format the input cells as TEXT
From the Excel Main Menu:
<format<cells<number tab
Category: Text

Does that help?
Post back if you have more questions.
--------------------------

Regards,

Ron
Microsoft MVP (Excel)
(XL2003, Win XP)


"WorkingHardly" wrote in message
...
I have a problem where sometimes when I try to enter a number in the
format:
1-4-1 in a cell, it automatically enters different number such as 35639. I
cannot find any hidden formulas, or conditions, and it doesn't happen in
every cell.Anyone have any ideas about what could be causing this?