Excel is treating 9/36 as a date value. Since there is no 36th day of
the 9th month, Excel treats it as 1-Sept-1936. Depending on how the
cell is formatted for display, there are any number of results that
might appear in the cell.

If you want 9/36 to be treated as text, not as a date, format the
cells as Text prior to typing in the value. Or, you can enter an
apostrophe before the text, and Excel will treat the input as literal
text and not convert it to a date. The apostrophe will not appear in
the cell but will appear on the formula bar.

If you want to enter 9/36 and have it treated as a number (0.25),
enter it with a leading = character:

=9/36

Format the cell as desired.


Cordially,
Chip Pearson
Microsoft Most Valuable Professional
Excel Product Group, 1998 - 2009
Pearson Software Consulting, LLC
www.cpearson.com
(email on web site)

On Wed, 9 Sep 2009 14:44:01 -0700, Rlsgates
wrote:

I am trying to type this in excel but keeps defaulting to another number
please help