Multiple formats within a cell

I just upgraded to Excel 2003. I used to be able to have multiple text formats within a cell, now I can't. For example, if my cell had

"part of this is red"

I could use the text color button to put the word red in red, and have the rest in black. Now this only shows up as red when I'm in edit mode of the cell, but reverts to all black when I press enter.

Is there a setting I have to adjust?

That's still the way it works for me in xl2003.

I'd try it again.

gailann wrote:
>
> I just upgraded to Excel 2003. I used to be able to have multiple text
> formats within a cell, now I can't. For example, if my cell had
>
> "part of this is red"
>
> I could use the text color button to put the word red in red, and have
> the rest in black. Now this only shows up as red when I'm in edit mode
> of the cell, but reverts to all black when I press enter.
>
> Is there a setting I have to adjust?
>
> --
> gailann
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> gailann's Profile: http://www.excelforum.com/member.php...o&userid=30798
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--

Dave Peterson

Thanks. I had tried it many times yesterday, but to no avail, even in a new spreadsheet, even after closing & re-opening Excel. Today, I opened a new spreadsheet, and it worked. Then I opened the spreadsheet that I needed it in, and it doesn't work. How frustrating!!!!!

Do you have any macros running that may do something when you enter the value in
the cell?

If you close excel and reopen in safe mode:

close excel
windows start button|Run
excel /safe

file|open yourworkbookname.xls

And test it out, does it work?

gailann wrote:
>
> Thanks. I had tried it many times yesterday, but to no avail, even in a
> new spreadsheet, even after closing & re-opening Excel. Today, I opened
> a new spreadsheet, and it worked. Then I opened the spreadsheet that I
> needed it in, and it doesn't work. How frustrating!!!!!
>
> --
> gailann
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> gailann's Profile: http://www.excelforum.com/member.php...o&userid=30798
> View this thread: http://www.excelforum.com/showthread...hreadid=504592

--

Dave Peterson

To expand a bit on Dave's post:

There's a property called ColorIndex in VBA that sets the color for
various objects. If a macro has a line including

Font.ColorIndex = 1

that runs when you press Enter after making your changes, it would
change the font color of the entire cell right back to black.

If your workbook has macros and you're comfortable digging into them,
you might do a Find on "ColorIndex" and see what you find.

Thanks for your help. I found out that the problem was with the number format of the cell. I often format an entire spreadsheet with a comma format. This prevented the text within a cell from being formatted as I wanted. When I change the number format of the cell to general, the format of the text changes appropriately.