2007 Excel formatting glitch

[guitarguy8004]

Hello,

I recently opened my company's revenue forecasting spreadsheet to find ALL formats removed. No outlined cells, all dates turned into number strings, percentages turned into 10+ digit decimals... such a mess. I fixed the formats (took an hour), saved, reopened... and again all formats are removed. I noticed strange code in the format "style" area of the ribbon. Generally where there is an option called "Normal", this is now gone and replaced with things like: "VERA:??????" and "????????" and "?? [0.00]_PE" and "???? [0.00]_...". The "%" button in the number section of the home tab ribbon also has stopped working entirely. When i attempt to use it, it acts more like a format remover.

This file uses live references to interact with several other spreadsheets so I'm hesitant to do any type of updating to the program that would mess things up. Ideally I just want things restored to how they were, the last thing i need is compatibility issues if I start updating versions etc. The same forecast for other brands within my company are totally fine so something glitched specifically in only this file and that's what I hope to have addressed.

If anyone is familiar with what might be wrong please help!

Thank you for your time.

[6StringJazzer]

Welcome to the Forum guitarguy8004! Can never have too many guitar players.

First of all, do you have a previous copy of the file with the correct formats? If so, then you can do a copy & paste formats with the format painter to the new file instead of spending an hour putting all the formatting back.

However, that will probably not help if it keeps happening. I suspect you have a corruption in your file. The results you are seeing are rather bizarre. If you have an older copy, you can create yet another copy and then copy the new data to the copy (Paste Values to preserve the formatting).

And if you have not been saving backups of this file, then you should start.