Excel won't follow Cell Number Formats

My Excel for Mac 16.43, part of Office for Mac 2020, recently recently started failing to recognise Number Formats instead insisting that, for instance, a value entered as '1' must be displayed, stored and calculated with as '0.01'.

The only other change I've noticed is that Excel also refuses to Find and Replace anything with the traditional blank,instead insisting on either a poipulated space, as ' ', or at least one of the quotation marks, as either ' or ", as seen in techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/excelgeneral/find-and-replace-with-blank---how-to-please/3908014