This morning Excel started doing strange things to dates typed into cells (not pasted, not imported). For instance, if I enter 6/26 it changes my entry to 01/06/2026, and displays it as 6/1/26 — it’s reversing the month and day and changing the year. But it’s not consistent. If I enter 6/1 it properly formats the entry as 06/01/2008, but still flips the month and day so it’s displayed as 1/6/08. The formatting of the cell looks fine — it’s set as MM/DD/YY (the 2nd option in the list). I checked older entries in an existing spreadsheet and they show the same format and are display properly. But if I change them — even entering the date that’s currently in the cell, it messes up the date and the format. This happens on a new spreadsheet and on existing ones (although on a new spreadsheet it shows the entry as 01/06/2026 but displays it as Jun-26). If I type 6/26/08 in a cell it doesn’t change the entry or format, but it left-justfies the entry, whereas dates are normally right-justified.
I don’t see anyplace to tell Excel to use a US date format instead of Euro date format. And I have no idea why it seems to think the year is 2026.
I may have picked up a virus yesterday, although Avast said it caught and deleted it. I’ve run Microsoft’s OneCare virus scan and Spybot S&D and neither found a problem.
Any ideas?
— Robert
