font color/format/size changes randomly

[J. Culbertson]

I've been passing back and forth a series of Excel files
between various employees in my office. We ran into errors
wherein data in cells would suddenly begin to duplicate
itself all over the spreadsheet, in other cells; I tracked
down that that was an error in Excel 2001, and had everyone
install the service update, but now there's a new problem.

The most recent file I was sent seemed to have all text
formatted blue and underlined. Changing it normally
(highlighting all text and clicking off the "underline"
option) would sometimes work, and sometimes crash the
application. Upon re-opening from a crash, often the
formats would look radically different-- new font sizes,
colors, and formatting.

Has anyone seen this error before? What can I do to correct
this, not only on my own machine, but on those of my
coworkers? Any advice would be genuinely appreciated.

-J. Culbertson
School District of Philadelphia

 

[Dave Peterson]

I think xl2001 is a MAC version of excel.

In windows, the blue underlined characters (usually) means that the cell
contains a hyperlink.

Maybe you could try clearing the hyperlinks (if you don't need them).
Select all your worksheet's cells (ctrl-A in windows)
Get to the VBE (Tools|macro|visual basic editor)
then show the immediate window (View|immediate window)

type this in and hit enter:
selection.hyperlinks.delete

If this doesn't work, maybe a similar post in one of the mac excel newsgroups
would help????