The number is not meaningless. It tells how many days passed since 1/1/1900.
9/24/08 is represented by 39715 internally.
You have to format with date instead of text.
And then it'll display it the way you want it to.

"sae" wrote:

I created a master sheet. when copying dates to another worksheet in this
workbook it is changing the date to a number which is meaningless. i.e.
9/24/08 to 23498. I changed the formating to text and it didn't help. It
didn't work in date format either.