Thank you, Dave, Gord and Shane. I'm sure you're right and the cells are
formatted as text. However, I've tried each method that you have suggested,
and nothing helps. The date formatting is still not applied.

My preferred custom format is 'd/m/yy_)' but I've tried several standard
date formats as well. I'm really stumped.

Any other ideas out there?

--
Lindsay Graham
Canberra, Australia
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"Shane Devenshire" wrote in message
...
Hi Lindsay,

I assume as have others that the dates are really text - so
1. Click an empty cell and choose Copy
2. Select all the date cell and choose Edit, Paste Special, Add
3. Then apply a date formatting of your choosing.

Cheers,
Shane Devenshire
Microsoft Excel MVP
Join http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ and download a free screensaver and
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"Lindsay Graham" wrote in message
...
I'm using Excel 2000 on a Vista desktop and on an XP laptop. I'm finding
that cell formatting will not work any more. For example, if I try to
apply date or custom date formatting to a cell containing '8/6/08', the
cell is not formatted as a date. The only possible thing that I can
think of is that I was trialling OpenOffice and initially I thought that
the problem was limited to Excel files that I had opened in OpenOffice.
But I'm now finding that the problem exists in new files created in Excel
that have never been opened in OpenOffice.

Can anyone help? I've never had this problem before.

--
Lindsay Graham
Canberra, Australia
---------------------------------------------
Please reply only to the newsgroup so that all may benefit.