Forum Discussion
Excel always defaults to dates and not to general
Hi,
No matter what I do, my excel always defaults to date format for the whole sheet, rather than general, meaning that when copying and pasting numbers into the sheet, they automatically change to dates.
Just to clarify - I know how to change their formats back for each cell, but this is frustrating and time consuming to have to do each time. Also there are existing formats in the sheet so its not feasible to change the whole sheet to general, as those existing formats will be lost, and in any case, I have done this before and reformatted the sheet, just to have it default to dates again on next open. Wondering if its an odd setting that's gone haywire somewhere?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
4 Replies
chimneysweep Try this - before pasting your data, preformat the cells in your workbook as text. Just select the empty cells where you will paste your data later, then open "Format cells" and select "Text". And click "Ok".
briandonforio we do not want to correct the workbook every time ... this is a template problem ... but where do we find the template?
- You can create a new workbook and save it as book.xlt in your XLStart folder. For each sheet in that workbook, format the sheets the way you want. When you click on the New icon on the standard toolbar, your new workbook will inherit all the settings from this template workbook. You can also create a new workbook and save it as sheet.xlt (also saved to your XLStart folder). Then any worksheet you add to an existing workbook will inherit its settings.
alenezi we have exactly this problem with one of our shared workbooks held on our LAN ... but we don't have the problem on files we create in other shared folders or on our own PCs. Where do we find the relevant template for this shared workbook? ... a search of folders has not found anything called XLStart
