Public Schedule Face-to-Face & Online Instructor-Led Training - View dates & book

dates

ResolvedVersion 2003

Elizabeth has attended:
Excel Intermediate course
Excel Advanced course

Dates

Why would you need to calculate dates from 1904 instead of 1900?

Edited on Wed 16 Apr 2008, 08:01

RE: Dates

Hi Elizabeth, Welcome to the forum, Thank you for your question, in answer; When Excel on the PC, perceives a date entry, it will transform that entry to a value which is a count of the number of days from 1/1/1900. However in relation to your question; I have never heard of PC versions calculating dates from 1904, however the Mac version does use the 1904 date as a start, As the Mac version preceeded the PC version perhaps it is the original method, but when the PC version was created 1900 was chosen as it was not a leap year, however in the early versions of Excel it was perceived as a Leap Year (a major bug) this was corrected in later versions. So my answer would be if you are working with colleagues who have the Mac version of Excel the sheets will have a date incompatibility if transfered between PC and Mac. If this has not answered your question you could come back with more information on this. However if it has, please click the Resolved link, best regards Pete.

Excel tip:

Convert Text to Columns in Excel 2010

If you have a cell in your Excel spreadsheet that contains a lot of text and you want to divide it into separate columns, this can only be done if there is a logical character which separates the text, for example, a comma.

Select the cells you would like to convert. On the Data tab, click Text to Columns. Choose the format of your current data.

Select Delimited if the text contains a logical character otherwise select Fixed Width if there are a certain number of spaces between each field.

Click Next when a preview of the data appears. Then select the type of character that separates the various fields. If the character is not listed, select Other and enter the character.

Click Next again and then choose the format for each of the columns. Select the column heading in the Data preview and then select a data type from the Column data format options.

Click Finish and the text will appear in several columns.

View all Excel hints and tips

Connect with us:

0207 987 3777

Call for assistance

Request Callback

We will call you back

Server loaded in 0.11 secs.