Cell Style Formatting Problem

[George Roberts]

I had built an expense report with Excel 2010 which has a mix of formats that consist of General, Currency and Custom.  Now that I am using Excel 2016 for this expense report, there is a formatting and cell style change issues.  When I open this expense report the next day, all of the General cells change to Date which leads to a misrepresentation of data that were numbers.  For example, an Account number should be shown as 9210, but the change to Date turns the cell to March 19,1925.  

I would then check the Cell Styles and then see the Normal Style has been changed to Date.  This is weird why this is happening to me now.  It forces me to clean up this expense report which takes an hour of my time to clean up the 36 spreadsheets.

[#2]

Hi George,

Sorry to hear. Unfortunately that's quite old issue and not specific to 2016 version of Excel. I din't have it myself and don't know exact answer, just see from time to time on forums. You may check here https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2007-excel/excel-2007-spontaneously-formats-... or google much more, perhaps will help in future.

[#3]

Hi Sergei,

I had this problem in version 2010 in a lesser frequency than version 2016.  I checked that forum link you gave me for Excel 2007 and saw the supposed fix offered by a couple of MS people.  The fact is, both responses said to fix the Cell Style.  I had always fixed the Cell Style a number of times where I would modify the Normal back to General.  Unfortunately, this problem of the General cell format being changed to the Date format would occur every time I sent this Excel file to someone else.  I would then look at the Cell Style where it had changed again.  As I said, this was my Expense Report, which is why I had to share that in my company. 

[#4]

I get the same thing. It doesn't seem to effect all cells with a vlookup formula but it does change some. Locking cells or protecting sheets or workbooks doesn't seem to help but it looks as if hidden sheets aren't changed