format cells

in an Excel 2002 sheet we have cells with general format and we put in
numbers like this one: 6/1.
A lot of people have access to this file
Someone changed some of the cells into a date format: 06-Jan-05
Unfortunately our backup is also corrupt.
Is there a way to revert this back?

Not "someone", but Excel, when using Excel 2002 SP3 in any case. If you want
to use fractions, you have to format as fractions, or else for numbers like
6/1, you have to precede it with an apostrophe ('). To convert back to what
you want, where the date is 06-Jan-05, then obviously the correct format is
'6/1, while 09-Jan-05 will convert to '9/1.

"Alfred" wrote:

> in an Excel 2002 sheet we have cells with general format and we put in
> numbers like this one: 6/1.
> A lot of people have access to this file
> Someone changed some of the cells into a date format: 06-Jan-05
> Unfortunately our backup is also corrupt.
> Is there a way to revert this back?
>

When you leave a cell with a format of "General", you are letting Excel change the format to whatever is appropriate for the 1st input to that cell. Usually, that format remains "General". However, if someone enters 25%, the format will change to "Percentage". If they enter 6/1, Excel will interpret that as a Date with the custom date format (on my computer, it became "d-mmm"). Once converted, it does not automatically revert back.

Consequently, the I think the short answer is there is no quick fix. Once the 6/1 is entered into a "General" formated cell, the actual value is changed to 38504 (Excel's numeric value for June 1, 2005). You would have to go to each affected range in each workbook, set the number formats to something more appropriate than "General", then try to determine what the intended values for that range of cells were and re-input them.


Regards,
Ron

I *suppose* you could try this, where the entries are now dates:

You'll need two empty columns - one for the TEXT() formula below, and
another column that is FORMATTED as text.

If the date is in A1, and using your example where 6/1 was converted into
Jan-6-05

=text(A1,"d/m") will give you 6/1 as a formula result. Copy it, and Paste
Special Values into the column that is formatted as text.

Good luck
Duke

"Alfred" wrote:

> in an Excel 2002 sheet we have cells with general format and we put in
> numbers like this one: 6/1.
> A lot of people have access to this file
> Someone changed some of the cells into a date format: 06-Jan-05
> Unfortunately our backup is also corrupt.
> Is there a way to revert this back?
>