Is there a reliable way to prevent Excel from formatting numbers as "General" from within AppSheet?

[Viktor]

Say I have a column of type “Date”. Whenever a user picks a date and syncs it to Excel, Excel formats is as “General” which turns it into some decimal number. E.g. the date 26-04-2021 becomes 44312,47432…

I know I can add an apostrophe before the number, but this isn’t very handy for columns that aren’t autogenerated such as columns where the user will pick a date. At least, I’m not quite sure how I should be able to do that in an easy way.
One way would be to have one column which the user interacts with, and then a second column that concatenates the apostrophe and the date which was picked by the user, but this seems very cumbersome, especially for multiple columns of this type. But perhaps this is the way?

I should add that Excel insists on using “General” as its formatting option. Even when I select “Date” it reverts back again after some days. Not sure of the reason why.

Any help is appreciated!

Best regards

[Steve]

Viktor:

I should add that Excel insists on using “General” as its formatting option. Even when I select “Date” it reverts back again after some days. Not sure of the reason why.

I’d think that a bug with Excel you should take up with Microsoft.

[Viktor]

Steve:

I’d think that a bug with Excel you should take up with Microsoft.

Perhaps this would be the best way to handle the issue, though I do not have much faith in Microsoft support. I’ll give it a try anyways

[Koichi_Tsuji]

I strongly suggest that you move your data to Google spreadsheet from Excel online,then at the end you would get stabilities as well as more of functionalities to deal with your business challenges.

[Viktor]

Yeah, I wish I could. Google Sheets seems so much easier to work with, but the users of this app are using Office 365, otherwise I would’ve gone with Google Sheets