You cannot format data imported from Access 2002 to Excel 2000 or to Excel 97

After you use Microsoft Office links to export data from Microsoft Access 2002 and open the file in Microsoft Excel 2000 or in Microsoft Excel 97, you cannot bring up the Format Cells... dialog box. When you right-click a cell and select Format Cells... (or click Cells on the Format menu), the Format Cells... dialog box does not appear, and you do not receive an error message.

If you copy and paste data from Access 2002 to Excel 2000 or to Excel 97, the same behavior occurs.

To work around this problem, do one of the following:

• Select the whole range of cells that contains the data from Access 2002.
  
  On the Format menu, click Cells or right-click the selected range of cells, and then click Format Cells....
• Select any cell in the range you want to format.
  
  On the Format command bar, click Fill color to set the background color of that cell any color. You can then use any method to bring up the Format Cells... dialog box.
• Use the AutoFormat feature to format the cells.
  
  To do this, select the range of cells that you want, and then on the Format menu, click AutoFormat. In the AutoFormat dialog box, click the format that you want to apply, and then click OK.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in Microsoft Access 2002.