Format won't stick

A co-woorker sent me a spreadsheet saying that she couldn't total a column of numbers. It is formatted for "Accounting, 2 decimal places", but it doesn't show zeros to the right of the decimal place. It treats the column like it was text when I try to sum it. I have tried everything like inserting a new column and doing a special paste to just put in the values and formating it and I get the same result. The sheet isn't protected or anything like that. Any ideas?

Hi,

Your description sounds similar to a problem I sometimes have (except I have numbers that don't act as a time value). The work around I used was to run through the Text to Columns wizard. This seemed to force Excel to recognise the format.

Don't know if this will help.

I would like to find out why Excel acts like this and if there's any proper way of preventing it.

regards,
Andy.

On Thu, 19 Jan 2006 08:06:05 -0600, tallyman00 wrote:

> A co-woorker sent me a spreadsheet saying that she couldn't total a
> column of numbers. It is formatted for "Accounting, 2 decimal places",
> but it doesn't show zeros to the right of the decimal place. It treats
> the column like it was text when I try to sum it. I have tried
> everything like inserting a new column and doing a special paste to
> just put in the values and formating it and I get the same result. The
> sheet isn't protected or anything like that. Any ideas?

Well, I had a similar problem when I imported data from a database ...
The solution was multiplying every cell with 1 ...
Or formatting the cells to numbers and just doubleclicking followed by
<enter> on every cell. But that can be really annoying if you have a lot of
data ... :-)
Or, there was something with PasteSpecial, and then you enter "1" in one
column or row and then select your cells and pastespecial to that column
with the value of 1 and select multiply ...