The solution is to change the format (General should work, too).

But I've never seen excel randomly change the format of a cell. I bet there's
something that's changing it.

If that cell contained a formula, then that could be a problem. But it doesn't
sound like that's the case.

I don't have any suggestion what the cause could be, but keep an eye out and
maybe you'll see the combination of things you're doing (copy|paste????) that's
causing the trouble.

Tamm wrote:

I have a cell that is formatted as text. It's a merged cell with settings for
wrapped text. It will only display # no matter how many characters are typed.
If I set it to number, or scientific it will display the text, but will
randomly reset to and display the # again. I have the sheet protected so
users can only enter data, it's on a networked computer where the spreadsheet
is shared. I'm using xp, and office pro 2007 on all the computers.

--

Dave Peterson