A photographer colleague has a simple spreadsheet for cataloging his
day's shoot. (lots of baby pictures) One of the columns, D, I think, is
formatted "General" in the Formatcellsnumbers box. Into this column,
he inputs an alpha numeric based on the days date, e.g. photo 1 today,
would be, A24-10-05, photo 2 ,B..and so on. all right justified.

He hit a snag last a few days ago when he tried to input A2-10-05 and it
came out 02/10/1405. a check on the number formatting properties for
this cell revealed it was using a Custom format of B2dd/mm/yyyy. Above
which was another option as the CF B2dd-mmm. I don't know if these
custom strings are part of his Excel XP as I have never seen them in
Excel 2000 and he assures me he has no knowledge on how to create them.

So, first of all I change the cell number format to "general" from the
dialogue box and inputted the same data, and it still came out as
02/10/1405 and the cell number format had reverted back to one of the
custom ones.

I then went back into the Custom cell format option and deleted the
custom strings. I then re-entered the data and the same thing happened
again, the custom strings were back. No matter what I did to this cell's
format and the custom strings they kept on changing the data to a date
format. Even stranger, it only seems to affect the letter A, if I input
B2-10-05, that is what is displayed in the cell and this is the same for
any other letter. Also, if I input A/A2-10-05 this also displays
correctly.

If the reference to B2 in the custom format, is a cell reference, this
cell is empty and is part of the worksheet title area.

Why won't custom format strings stay deleted.

Any help with this most gratefully received.

Mike H


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