That solved it (I think)
It lead me here
http://office.microsoft .com/en-us/excel-help/customize-how-excel-starts-HP005199391.aspx
I can't select as answer as TR is still broken and has been for a year now.
This may take a few minutes to setup but can save you time, going forward.
Certain events can inadvertently change formatting of your sheet and it can require a painstaking process to get it back to the way you need your data.
1. Create a new sheet in your workbook (possibly renaming it to "TEMPLATE").
2. Format the rows and columns of TEMPLATE analogously to your data sheet(s).
Whenever you need to fix formatting on your data sheet:
1. Open TEMPLATE
2 .Ctrl+A to select the entire sheet
3. Ctrl+Shift+C to copy formatting
4. Open your data sheet
5. Ctrl+A to select the entire sheet
6. Ctrl+Shift+V to paste formatting
Follow Sven2167's steps - then save the empty - but correctly formatted workbook as a template, and Excel will default to opening your custom template every time.
The best you could do is create the new sheet, then click the box in the header row, to the left of cell label A, and above cell label 1; it has a little triangle in the corner of it. This will select the entire sheet, you can then right-click and choose 'Format cells...', select 'Text' and click 'OK'.
Hope that helps! ;-)
Sven2157
Excel 2010 Question
The only thing I use excel for is technical documents, so every time excel decides to turn a date into a 5 digit number, or a 1% value into 0.01, I want to shoot Balmer.
Made worse by the fact that if you convert to text, it converts the changed values, it doesn't put back what you had before. So 01/01/2001 becomes 36892 when you convert the date to text.
Is there a way to permanently make excel always format all cells to text when you start a new worksheet? So it doesn't keep doing this to me?
Thanks.