When we export a BOM from a drawing, and then open it in Excel 2007, many of the part numbers get converted into dates. I don't know an exact part number that gets converted like this, but an example part number format might be 10-0033. I assume that the part before the dash is being interpreted as a month, and the 4 digit number as a year.

Note that the BOM's in SW are not excel BOM's. We are doing a "save as" in .xls format. We've also attempted to save as .csv format, but when we open this in Excel, the same problem occurs.

Changing the format of the column in Excel to be a number format only converts the dates to another number (the internal computer version of the date. There doesn't seem to be any way to convince Excel to convert the date back to the part #.

The only work around we've found is to export as a CSV, then open it in Notepad. Copy everything, and then paste it into excel after first setting the correct column to be a number format. But, there has got to be a more straightforward way. My efforts to try to stop Excel from doing the date conversion has not been successful either.