I have an Excel spreadsheet that went bonkers on me (technical term) and I'm wondering what went wrong.

It's about 1400 rows by 7 columns, and contains only data, that is non-numerical information. I have salvaged the data by copying it to the Windows clipboard and pasting it into a new, blank spreadsheet, then using the AutoFit tool to set the column widths. The salvaged spreadsheet is as good as new, all the fill colors are right, the formulas work, everything is good.

I don't know what I did to cause the original spreadsheet to go wrong. All at once the column widths and formatting got weird, I couldn't align columns (If the data were left-justified I couldn't change it to centered, for example) and the cells with formulas in them (example: =countA(D2:D1286) to count the number of cells with data) showed the formulas rather than the result of the calculation. It's as though the spreadsheet got put into some alternate viewing mode that I couldn't get out of.

Does anybody know what happened?

tanstaafl.