Hi Sue,

If you open Excel and type the account number in question into a cell, do you see the same Date behaviour?

I have seen this once before where the account number had the characters necessary to be interpreted by Excel as an Extended Notation number (1.2 EE 85 or something like that). Excel tries to be helpful when it sees characters or numbers and attempts to format it in a way it assumes you want it in.

If your account numbers in a column of the Financial Reporter are just account codes with numbers, and not account-department pairs (which would be separated by a dash), then particular numbers might be interpreted by Excel as dates. You might be able t get around this by putting a leading apostrophe in front of the account number - ie '122309 instead of simply 122309. This would force this cell as text.

By the way, what kind of formatting are you doing in Excel that you need to export the financial spec, make changes, and then import it back in? You did mention sorting - what kind of sorting? I presume that your specs do not use SmartSheet.