Why are some blank cells seen as zero in Excel?

Question

We have Excel documents that date back years. Some of the document sheets haven't been touched for over 15+ years (or to the very early versions of Excel). They've had a new sheet added each year - using the same formatting as last year.

As we've begun to import the whole 40+ sheets into a database we've noticed that sometimes blank cells from years 1993 and before act strangley. Although they are blank they have imported as zeros in our database.

Is there an explination for this?

I'm not sure if someone has gone back a limited amount of years and updated some formats, but it seems strange that this happens in most of the doucments we have.

And how do we go about making blanks cells "really blank", without having to do this cell by cell? (...I don't think my soul could manage it!)

Thanks Michael.

Answer 1

In some versions of Microsoft Excel, if a cell is formatted as a "number" cell, it will fill in 0 when it is blank and has been active (the cursor has been on it, etc).

You might try selecting all the cells and re-formatting them to text or no formatting by right-clicking.