You may want to check this out:
http://www.j-walk.com/ss/excel/usertips/tip028.htm

tj

"woodrat" wrote:

In Excel I've formated a date column to be, say March 22 1956 after typing
3/22/1956. Is there any to get this to work so I could type in a date befor
1900 (by typing 11/2/1858 and get November 2 1858?)