Help With Excel - Weird Squares - Help!?

Question

I'm pretty decent with Excel, but all of a sudden, I have weird squares in place of where the decimal points used to be. Anybody have this before? What can I do? The rest of the numbers in the cell are unaffected. This happened to all of my Excel documents. Is this a virus?

I never changed my font - it is still Arial.

Answer 1

It would be interesting to know if the square behaves like a decimal point - that would mean the following would be likely to solve the problem...
This is for W2K, XP may be slightly different..

Start - Settings - Control Panel - Regional options - Numbers
The entry against "Decimal Symbol" should be a . but I suspect you'll find a square here. Change it to a dot, then click apply.

If it's not a square, change it to something else, then back to a dot, then click apply.

It may just be a glitch, an "amusing" friend or colleague, or possibly virus related. Just have to wait and see, I guess.

Good Luck!

Answer 2

Which font are you using? Open Word and see if you get the square block with the same font. I know Excel and I don’t see any other way that you could change a comma into a box. Do you have custom add-ons, or are you using Visual Basic? I don’t have experience with these and they may introduce your error.

It sounds more like one of the above than a virus. Viruses tend to be a whole lot crueler and do more nasty things than switch a box for a comma. You should be running an Anti Virus software. If so then that would catch 95% of the viruses that are sent your way. Most viruses are put together by “script kitties” who take pieces of other viruses and cut and paste them together and I have never heard of a virus that makes such a minor change to a program. I did look at the Help Wizard, but it didn’t help me much. If you find a cure for your problem drop me a line, please.

Answer 3

I believe that you changed your font and the new font doesn't recognize the decimal point. Try changing your font to something more standard