If you see that serial number in the formulabar, then I bet you're looking at
formulas:

tools|options|view tab|uncheck formulas
(xl2003 menus)

You can also hit
ctrl-`
(control backquote, the key to the left of the 1/! on my USA keyboard)

Flagworld wrote:

A spreadsheet of mine seems to have chnaged the date format into serial form.
I cannot work out how to chnage it back to dd/mm/yy format

--

Dave Peterson