Formating cells

[worduser]

when I enter a number 1-19, the cell automatically set this Jan-19. I try to
set it to General under by right-clicking the cell and selecting Formatting
Cells, but it changes to some number like 38909. I keep on trying and does
the same thing. Is there away to make General the default all the time?

I use Excel 2000

 

[little_creature]

The trick is to select the cell and formated them into "text" BEFORE
you start typing. Don't have Mac here right now, so I have tried it in
PC excel, so no guarantee, but shoold behave similarly.


worduser said the following on 8.5.2006 21:25:

 

[CyberTaz]

First, this is the Mac XL newsgroup, but this is the same on both PC & Mac -
if you are actually typing in the characters 1-19 (including the hyphen), it
is *not* a number. There is no such number.

Either type an apostrophe first (i.e., '1-19) or preformat the cells as Text
rather than any type of number. XL is written to interpret 1-19 (among other
things) as a Date.