Stop Excel from Reformatting Chart Series Name Value

[DaveInIowa]

When creating a new chart series, I am taking a text value from the spreadsheet which I have formatted as I would like it to appear in the chart's legend. It is a "date" of the form Aug 05. Whenever I assign this value to the Name property, it keeps getting reformatted as 5-Aug.

To get around this I'm appending a space in front of the value before assigning it to the name but this seems kind of clumsy. Can someone tell me why Excel insists on reformatting this value and is there a better way to assign the Name for these types of values?

 

[SkipVought]

Hi,

FIRST, read and UNDERSTAND -- Why do Dates and Times seem to be so much trouble? faq68-5827

Then you will follow this --

You do NOT have a read date in your source data.

You THINK that you have entered Month August, Year 2005.

But in reality, you have Aug 5, 2005. (select a date cell and VIEW it in the Formula Window!)

So you need to decide if your SOURCE DATA is correct.

Skip,

_{[red]A palindrome gone wrong?[/red]
A man, a plan, a ROOT canal...
PULLEMALL!}

 

[DaveInIowa]

The value in the cell is actually Aug 05 (without a leading single quote). This is how it appears in the Formula bar. I don't want to treat it as any kind of date value and have formatted it's column as Text.
My question had to do with how do I get Excel to take the cell contents at face value and stop trying to convert it to a date?

 

[SkipVought]

IF, IF, IF Aug 05 is REALLY a string...

then Excel will NOT change the format!

If I were sitting by your desk, I'd bet you a steak dinner, that what you have is a DATE.

Try changing the Cell Format to GENERAL and tell me what happens.

Skip,

_{[red]A palindrome gone wrong?[/red]
A man, a plan, a ROOT canal...
PULLEMALL!}