John,

Dates in XL are a countof the number of days since 1 January 1900 so day
number 21,105 is 12 October 1957, that is why you get that date.

When you say

.................................................. .......................................
So they
went to format them into dates and they all ended up going into #####.

What actual format did they try to use?

--
HTH

Sandy

Replace@mailinator with @tiscali.co.uk


"NinaGrewalOff"
wrote in message
news:NinaGrewalOff.1vezek_1126811286.0877@excelfor um-nospam.com...

Another office phoned me about a problem they are having with excel.
They had a large list of dates about 4600 columns long that were all
displayed as one long string of numbers, i.e. like 021105. So they
went to format them into dates and they all ended up going into #####.
As I was looking through the help topics on Excel I found that numbers
will be displayed like this if the column is not big enough in width.
So I got them to do that but to no avail, they are still displayed as
#####. Also while doing my own testing I found that even if they do
get the numbers shown they will probably get nonsensical dates. For
example, when I format using date (also did some custom formatting for
the date but it does the same thing) my 21105 (as Excel deletes the
front 0) turns into 12/10/57, when it should show up as 02/11/05. I
thought this might be a problem with the 0 not showing up so I did
121105 but this shows up as 28/07/2231. I have very little experience
with Excel, yet because I know the most about computers amongst the two
offices they want me to figure everything out. Any help would be
appreciated, thanks

John Penner


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NinaGrewalOff
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