I am having problems with cell formatting in Excel. I have Office 365 & I am running it on a Windows 10 PC. I am trying to format the cell to accept anything that is typed in. The cell will contain alpha, numbers & special characters. When I format the cells in a particular column, one of the headings is numbers. I choose 'General' which is suppose to accept anything. I go to one of the cells in the formatted column and enter 'April 1966'. After I tab out of the cell or hit enter, the data becomes 'Apr-66'. I check the cell's format & now it shows up as 'Custom'. I then change the format to general & the 'Apr-66' now becomes '24198'.
The column is set up for a free format date. The cells contain a date for my Genealogy Family Tree on Ancestry.com. The format on Ancestry is 'DD MMM YYYY'. If don't now the day, I keep it blank. If I enter '01 Apr 1966' or 'XX Apr 1966' or '00 Apr 1966, in the cell, it is accepted.
How do I format the cell to be free format. Also how do I prevent the formatting from changing from 'General' to 'Custom'. Also does anyone know what '24198' from above is suppose to represent.
Thanks John