When I type
Jan 06
in a cell, I get January 6th, of the current year.

Is that what you meant?

I've found it's always better to fully type the date in the cell (year, month
and day).

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And formatting a cell only changes the way you see what's in that cell. The
actual value doesn't change.

And to excel, a date is just a number of days from a starting date. Usually
it's the number of days since December 31, 1899 (for wintel users).

I've never seen dates that change to general, though.

If you don't get a good answer here, you may want to try the .charting
newsgroup.

rodger wrote:

the display changes on the graph, instead of Jan-06 it might read 389001 or
something, the data worksheet would be right. Also another problem is when
typing in data in a cell formated for date I would type 1/06 it would display
Jan 06 in the cell but up at the tool bar on the worksheet it would read
1/5/2006.

"Dave Peterson" wrote:

Do the dates change or do they just change the way they're displayed.

January 23, 2003
and
01/23/2003

could represent the same value.

rodger wrote:

--

Dave Peterson


--

Dave Peterson