I have an existing  spreadsheet at work  that someone else created  several
years ago . There's a column  of dates  that were entered  into text  field (the
column was formatted  as text). When I try to change  the formatting  to date  in
the column, the field  performs a division calculation.

Example: Text field display: 5/13/08
When I change-  Date field display: 1/0/00

The formula  bar show  =5/13/08 . This is automatic  for some reason. When I try
to remove  the equal sign, it redisplays. There's no vba  code nor conditional
formatting. Can someone help  with this?

The spreadsheet  has data in it dated back in 1998: Most likely
created using Excel 97 then converted to Excel 2000 and finally Excel
2003. Also I noticed that ALL the cells in the spreadsheet are
formatted as text.