Formatting issues number showing as date

[MyronCope]

I have an excel sheet in our application and users of the application should be able to open the excel sheet and tab through to each field, enter a value and then tab to the next field. The problem occurs in this case:

tab to DateColumn1: enter a date
tab to DateColumn2: enter a date
tab to DateColumn3: enter a date
tab to NumberColumn: enter 1000

when you tab off NumberColumn the 1000 number is displayed as the date:

9/26/1902

Not sure why this is happening it looks like excel is carrying the date formatting over from the previous column. When I do not tab through, for example if I simple go right to the NumberColumn field and enter 1000 and then tab off it will correctly format the 1000 as a number.

has anyone seen this? any advice?

[protonLeah]

It sounds like the cells were left in the default General format. You should explicitly format the date cells as date, and the number cells as number.