If you have a text field like 'description' starting with an minus '-' or plus '+' sign, formatting in Excel no longer works. This is because Jira believes that the fields refer to a number e.g. '-6' but instead sees '-x'. As a result it throws the error "Number Stored as Text" in the next column. This error will then turn off all formatting in the later Excel cells and you will start to see some strange data. For example, date fields will not be formatted.