Upgraded from Office 2007 to Office 2013, apostrophes appear out of nowhere.

**bibu** · 10-28-2014, 08:24 AM

I've migrated from 2007 to 2013, and I find it strange that these apostrophes appear in the cells. (Especially since they are not displayed unless the cell is selected).
What I want to ask is if it is normal or it's a bug - I'm thinking that maybe Excel thinks it's a date and formats the year with an apostrophe in front, but why and how can I undo this?

**Speshul** · 10-28-2014, 08:27 AM

Those are there to stop the cells from becoming dates. The apostrophe can be used as kind of a comment equivalent for the text in a cell, if you type '=SUM(A1:A1), it won't be a formula, it will be the text string =SUM(A1:A1) without the apostrophe, and will not calculate.

You can still calculate against cells with this in them, if you do =len() on our data you will see they are all still only 3 characters long.

**bibu** · 10-28-2014, 08:32 AM

Thanks for your answer, this makes sense. I didn't put them there so I panicked a bit, I will investigate further to see how they got there in the first place.