Hi,

I have made no changes to the formatting of the cells in the worksheet, so it is set to general.

If a user accidentally types something like 1-2 in a cell (or if they forget and type "one-half" as 1/2 instead of 0.5), it changes the format to date. Even after deleting 1-2, all future entries in that cell are treated as a date, so 10 becomes 10-Jan and negative numbers become ****.

My question is: is there a way of stopping excel from "permanently" changing the format of the cell from general to date, just because I typed 1-2 or something similar.

Cheers
free