Excel Bug Confusing Me

Hi,
I have a a column with dates, they all look normal. I also have a column that has an excel formula pulling from the date column. In some, not all, of these cells the date shows normally. BUT if I try and copy and paste it, those cells have 42205 instead of 19-Feb-2015, for example. It's about 500 or so cells with the problem. I cannot for the life of me figure out what formatting is doing this and I have to fix it in order to use this data in R. Any suggestions please?

(All of the usual change formatting tricks are not helping)

It would appear the cell you are pasting the date into, is formatted as GENERAL.

Try changing the cell format to the date format you are pasting and see what happens.

Thank you, but I have already tried this. None of the usual reformatting works. The only thing that does work is going back into the original file, copy a cell with the date, and pasting it. I would prefer not to do that 500 times.

I have tried copying and pasting the format
I have tried switching out into multiple formats
I have tried creating new columns
I have tried pasting data into a text file and copying from there

This is not a simple "change to date format" problem.

Post your file and we'll take a look ?

Thank you again, I probably should have just grabbed a few rows and saved them just to find out exactly what was going on. But I just shouldered on and copied and pasted until they were all resolved. No way to see the broken rows anymore. I was hoping someone would say "Oh yeah - Excel does this weird thing with dates, try this". Google gave me some interesting solutions, but in the end, copying and pasting the original was the winner - as tedious as it was.

K. Glad you got it sorted out.

Cheers.