All “General†values changed to “Date†format

[FrankWood]

I have a user that has all of her spreadsheets valued suddenly changed from
General to Date format. These spreadsheet have nothing in common except that
they are all used by the same user. She is using Excel 2007 on Windows XP.
I checked the cell styles and “Normal†was set to date rather than General.
I changed it back but she would not have made this change herself.

I checked and there is no file in the XLStart folder in her user directory.

The problem remains now. New Blank Spreadsheets open with the default set
back to “General†and seem to be ok. However, any existing Spreadsheet seems
to have been reset to the default of “Date†format for values.

My question is twofold.

1. How could this have happened *without* her changing the “normal†style to
date?
2. How can we reformat all of her many spreadsheets that already exist back
to “General†easily as some actually do contain dates as well as normal
'non-date' values. (I don’t want to have to open each and every SS and
format cells manually).

Any help is GREATLY appreciated! Thanks in advance!

Frank Wood

 

[FrankWood]

ok, did some more research and found:
1. changing the "Normal" style back to General seemed to work for all new
files.
2. Did not work for any file that had been opened and subsequently saved
while Normal was set to "Date" format.
3. Opening each file and changing the normal back to general seemed to work
in some files but not others. Is "Normal" style (or all styles) file
specific? I would think so, but not sure why it only worked in certain
instances and not others. I could not see what was different from 1 file to
another. Perhaps there was some data entry in one and not another???
4. (and most importantly) I have not discovered a cause. How could this
default have been changed if not by the user? I have seen this one other
time, but by a different user that is prone to "experiment" and I wrote it
off as such. Today's user, however, is *not* prone to experiment so I am left
in complete puzzlement as to the cause. Any ideas???

Thanks in advance,

Frank Wood