I previously had a laptop running Win7 and Office 2013. I used it to maintain spreadsheets on our SharePoint site that pulled data from SQL. Last week I was given a new laptop with Win10 and Office 365.

The situation is this: using Excel (Office 365 version) on the new laptop, every time I refresh the data, Excel changes one of the columns to the Date format. This throws off the formulas I have setup (they now show a VALUE error instead of data). I can change the formulas to compensate, but it creates a problem for other users who have not been upgraded to the same version of Excel. When they refresh the data, the version of Excel they are using doesn't auto-format (it leaves it in the General format) and the formulas (which I corrected to show correctly in my version of Excel) no longer work. So I can fix the problem for myself and a few others who have the latest version of Excel but doing so hurts the people who have not yet been updated (my organizations IT folks don't expect to fully switch all users to the newest version until mid to late next year).

Is there a way to stop Excel from changing the format on the imported data from the SQL query? Alternatively, is there a way to set the data from the SQL query to automatically change to the date format? Either option will work, I just need to keep the behavior consistent among all users.