Hi All

I have a puzzling issue with a worksheet I'm working on.

I'm supplying catalogue numbers to a list of items by concatenating 3
three columns. Typically , this is correctly giving numbers such as

12234-12-56
13498-7-89
85787-cb-78

This is working fine for the vast majority of items but for a few ,
which steadfastly refuse to keep the format the concatenation demands.

For example , a cell that should read 6534-12-10 is in fact reading
1692879. Others show a date , like 10/12/6541

This is only happening to about 15 cells in a list of more than 20,000.
I've tried changing formats to no avail.

Does anyone have any ideas why this should be happening? I'm not asking
Excel to interpret anything in the cell , just to represent the
concatenation accurately.


Grateful for any advice.


Best Wishes