Weird Number Formatting Issue Just Cropped Up

So...

In my job as a Technical Writer, I don't use Excel a lot, but I do use it. Three months ago, I had a couple of spreadsheets that I was using to keep tabs on some software Release Notes. All was well and good. I haven't had to use Excel since then. Until this week.

Now... whenever I type a number in a cell, Excel right-aligns it. That's not a big deal. I know how to right-click, and change the formatting, and yesterday, I actually did that to a bunch of different cells. However, Excel was right-aligning numbers in such a way that the last digit of the number overlapped the right border of the cell.

Like so: excel1.png

Worse than that, I opened the spreadsheets I'd worked on three months previous, and they all exhibited the same behavior! It doesn't help to double-click on the right border, or drag the right border–the maddening alignment remains.

Somewhere along the way, something changed in my Excel.

Any thoughts, anyone? It's not a huge deal, it's just annoying.

Thanks in advance,
D.

This might be a WINDOWS issue, rather than an Excel issue.
I suggest you clean out temp files, reboot and try your spreadsheet again.
Please report back if this helps or not.

Hi Richard,

Thanks for your quick reply. This is just a quick 4- or 5-cell spreadsheet I typed some numbers in to demonstrate.

Hi candybg,

Thanks for your quick reply! Cleaned out Windows %temp% files. Rebooted. Problem still persists.

D.

Looks fine on mine.

Excel will always right align something it sees as a number when you type it into the cell. Not sure why you're seeing them overlapping into the next cell though.

Sorry not to be able to help

I think I've figured it out.

It's some weird font-rendering bug. I *did* make a change to the way Windows renders my fonts about a month ago, and it appears to have messed up this alignment, somehow. If I change the font in the cells in question to say, Segoe, 11-point (which I much prefer over Calibri, anyway), the overlapping does not occur.

Look at this:
excel2.png

For the record, the font-rendering mechanism is called GDIPP. It makes Windows fonts display better. Unless you're in an Excel spreadsheet, apparently.

Thanks for all the quick help, you guys!