Trouble With Text Input

[Fellow]

I opened an old spreadsheet on a new computer and started entering
data.
It took me a few seconds to realize that excel was behaving strangely:

1) Dates entered in any human-readable format (i.e. "june 3, 2009" or
"2009 06 03") are being treated as text, regardless of how the cell is
formatted. It recognizes dates entered in the serial date format
(39715 is September 24, 2008, etc.).
Existing dates are unaffected.

2) Typing CTRL+; is supposed to insert the current date into a cell.
Today when I press that key combination I get "2009â–¡07â–¡15" with white
squares inserted between the year, month and date. When I hit Enter to
confirm Excel discards the first white square and everything after it,
registering only "2009", which is the serial number for Saturday,
July 1, 1905. Not what I'm after.

I thought maybe there's something amiss with my regional settings but
everything seems to be in order. I have two input languages installed,
English and Hebrew, but this hasn't been a problem in the past. I'm
going to reinstall Excel and see what happens. Can someone suggest a
reason for this behavior?

Thanks,


imafellow

 

[Joel]

Just change the formating of the cell to date and the number 39715 will
change to a datge. 39715 is the number of days since Jan 1, 1900. The cells
in the workbook must of been formated as Number instead of general. This is
not a text problem. If a cell is formated as General excel will automatically
recognize a date. If a cell is formated a a number excel will display a
number instead of a date.

 

[liamflowe]

Just change the formating of the cell to date and the number 39715 will
change to a datge.  39715 is the number of days since Jan 1, 1900.  The cells
in the workbook must of been formated as Number instead of general.   This is
not a text problem. If a cell is formated as General excel will automatically
recognize a date.  If a cell is formated a a number excel will display a
number instead of a date.  

I guess I didn't explain myself clearly enough.
Say I open a new Excel document, select a cell, and then change its
format to 'yyyy-mm-dd' from the date format types. Now let's say I
enter a date in that cell in English, as "June 23, 2009". Excel
generally recognizes this as a date and automatically changes it to a
serial date number, but displays it as "2009-06-23". This even works
if the cell is formatted as "general" before I type in the English
date; as soon as I switch the cell to a date format Excel recognizes
the contents as a date.

This was not happening. Excel simply would not recognize dates.

As it turns out I reset my regional settings and it cleared up the
problem, so no worries.

Thanks,


imafellow