Excel workbook Formatting cells

Question

My colleague has sent me an excel file with lots of data, pivot tables, and charts. But there is something weird with the file's default cell format. When I enter a date into a cell "1/1/2014" it turns into "EUR 41,640.00" Where "EUR" is the Euro symbol.

I right clicked on a cell and went to number format cells and under number, it says "Accounting" and under symbol it says "Euro". So that explains it. Now, my question is, can I change the format for the entire workbook and all its sheets and charts and tables, in one shot, to something that a normal/default excel sheet has where it can recognize dates for dates, currency for currency, and numbers for numbers and will that mess us all the existing pivot tables and data? I would think that it won't mess up the numbers but simply the formatting but I want to be absolutely sure before I change the default format for the entire workbook.

I went to File-> Options->General/Formulas etc but I can't find cell formats there.

Answer 1

Excel just thinks this is a number, namely 41640.

For each column of Euros-that-should-be-dates, right-click on the column header (like the letter A above the first column) and choose Format Cells...

Then pick your preferred date format.

This happens sometimes when the file has different currency or date default settings.