Yes. It did nothing.

"Dave Peterson" wrote:

Did you actually clear the formatting after the contents were in the cell?

Just curious.


mdavison wrote:

I'm sorry, I thought I made it pretty clear that this is all English language
text - alpha characters. I also think I mentioned (I'm sorry if I did not)
that I cleared ALL formatting from the entire sheet - so 'General' would be
the default cell setting.

Anyone else experience this? And again - its RANDOM. Multiple cells in other
locations in the same column have no problem withtis. Sometimes Format
painter works, sometimes it doesn't.

"Dave Peterson" wrote:

(Saved from a previous post)

It could mean a few things.

1. The columnwidth is too narrow to show the number.

Widen the column or change the font size of that cell. Or change the
numberformat to General.

2. You have a date/time in that cell and it's negative

Don't use negative dates. If excel was helping you, it may have
changed the format to a date. Change it back to General (or some
other number format).

If you need to see negative date/times:
Tools|options|Calculation Tab|and check 1904 date system
(but this can cause trouble--watch what happens to your dates
and watch what happens when you copy|paste dates to a different
workbook that doesn't use this setting)

3. You have a lot of text in the cell, the cell is formatted as Text.

Format the cell as general.

4. You really have ###'s in that cell.

Clean up that cell.

5. You have # in a cell, but it's format is set to Fill.

Change the format
(format|cells|alignment tab|horizontal box, change it to General.

mdavison wrote:

OK, I'm not new to Excel, just 07. And this is killing me. I have a user who
uses Excel to track discussions of phone interviews, so she's using one cell
in which to type her comments. MOST of the time, the text is fine. Randomly,
any given cell will suddenly appear as all pound signs. Thes eare the things
I have tried and failed to prove consistent fixes:

1 - number of characters is irrelevant, happens on long and short text
2 - I make sure there is no hard return at end of text
3 - copy /past into plain text and bring back (sometimes works, sometimes not)
4 - changed font across entire tab sheet. nada
5 - remove empty space AND period at end of her typing. It worked once then
on today's two did nothing for me.

I have only seen this happen when text is exported from a SQL dbase and left
funky symbols in with the characters. But that was also importing into 03, so
this 07 newly typed in freak has me stumped.

--

Dave Peterson


--

Dave Peterson