Excel general format chnaged to date format??

Hi

I just moved an excel file that has loads of links to sqlserver from 2007xl to 2010 xl.

On sheets irrespective of whether it gets the data from the sqlserver or not- all fields that were in gereral format have now defaulted to date format.

Is there some why of changing this?

Even if I change the format of a cell on a pivot table- if I double click the data, it's shown back in date format.

Any help much appreciated

Thanks

David