Hi

basically, excel stores dates as a number, 1 being the 1/1/1900 (when you're
not using the 1904 date system) so 10804 is 10,804 days after the 1/1/1900,
which will give you July 30, 1929.

however, if you type 1/08/04 in a cell that you've not formatted before (and
you're unticked the 1904 date system check box), excel should by default
recognise this as a date and you shouldn't have a problem. However, if
you're played around with the formatting and entered other dates, excel by
this stage might have been very confused. so open up a new workbook and just
enter 1/08/04 and see what happens. if that date still changes to 3-79-94,
try in another cell the current date and see what happens with that (sortcut
key combination of [ctrl] [;])

Cheers
JulieD

"12pt93" wrote in message
...
I am having major problems with formatting dates. When I enter 10804 and
try
to format the cell (format,cells,number.date,03/14/98), the number in the
cell changes to 07/30/29. When I type 1/08/04, it changes to 3-79-94.

What is going on?? I tried going into tools, options, calculations, 1904
date system to see if the date program was off but when I tried that, it
changed 01/08/04 into 1/9/04.

I am at a complete loss and am going crazy.
I am entering dates as text right now, but I need to use these dates in
calculations.