Forum Discussion
Excel 365 online, Formatted as dates, but displayed as numbers?
My group has been using a shared excel work book for over a year and around the start on 2021 a new "bug?" has developed.
Our sheet has several columns that are formatted as dates. When we open this sheet in the a browser (Google Chrome) the date are correctly displayed as dates, however once an edit has been made to any part of the sheet, all of our 'date formatted cells' revert to being displayed as numbers. E.g. "14Jan2021" (mmdddyyyy) ==> "44210"
These cells are still formatted as dates, but remain displayed as numbers until I refresh the page. This bug is not seen when opened the sheet in the desktop app, and has only been noticed since the beginning of the year.
How can I stop this from happening?
On desktop you shall apply Date format to the cells.
On Excel for web to change regional settings in File->Settings
18 Replies
I see second post today about this bug, but can't reproduce. Is that only when more than one person works with the file?
In any case I'd Send a Frown from Help->Feedback.
SergeiBaklan Thank you!
This is a shared document and the problem is only present when opened in the browser.
It may help to know that these cells are within a table on the sheet, (with data validation parameter for these dates).
For example, the selected cell in column "H" is formatted as 'Date' and while the formula bar displays the date as "12/11/2020", the cell it's self displays "44176".
Note: We have recently increased the number of people using the sheet form 5 to 12. I'm considered that someone may have accidentally made a change that that has caused this problem, but I am flummoxed on what it could be.
Hello, I have the same issue, but the problem is visible only in desktop Excel. The cells contain a date (like 28.5.2021) but it is show a number instead (for example 44451). When I open this document in a browser (Chrome), the dates are show in a different format (DD/MM/YYYY) but at least it is readable.
No change of format helped. Where is the problem? Any ideas why is this happening?
Thanks!
