Excel treats dates as the number of days elapsed since the first of January
1900, for example today, the 15th of November 2006 is actually 39036. You
can format it in many different ways, but the real content of the cell is
still 39036.
When you enter a date into a cell like today's date it has to be entered as
15/11/2006 or 16-11-2006 to get Excel to recognise that you are entering a
date, it then converts it to the number which can be re-formatted.
What you are importing, eg 10206 will not be recognised as a date, just as a
number. If you format it as a date it will give the date as the 10206th day
after 01-01-1900.
There are ways of using text formulas followed by paste special values to
convert a number to the date value you need, but I'm afraid that if you're
importing stuff that has two or more different ways of representing the
date, its going to be very time consuming to achieve this.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,
Regards,
Alan.
"Cat" wrote in message
...
Yes, I know this has been covered a MILLION times yet although I've looked
through many threads, I can't seem to find one that covers this EXACTLY.
I'm importing info into Excel 2000. One of the columns is a date field..
but it is not consistent.. for example, it can read 10206 or 100206 (both
to
mean Oct 2, 2006). When I try to format it into a date (10/2/06) it turns
it
into something strange, such as 01/02/36. Don't know why this is
happening.
When I click on a seperate cell w/out any info (that is formatted to a
date
What you are importting
field), and type in 100206 it STILL doesn't come out right! HELP!!! I
need
this info for tomorrow!!!