In the past 2 weeks, a co-worker and I have each run into a problem when working with Pivot Tables in excel 2003. We both use pivot tables every week, and we both never ran into this problem before.

The problem:
When running pivot tables from a data tab, the pivot table doesn't recognize certain numbers if the format is different. We've tried copying & pasting the data (paste values, paste formatting), and we've tried formatting all of the data so it's the same, but there are only two fixes that we've found that actually work: 1) retyping the data (not a good solution when the data tab has thousands of rows) and 2) copying the entire column, pasting as unformatted text into word, and then pasting back into excel. While the second solution works, it is obviously not ideal. The bigger problem is that you don't even know that your pivot table isn't returning correct data unless you are keen enough to double check it.

Has anyone else run into this problem recently? Is there a patch that can fix it?