As per Michael's note: the DV cells in Book2 must be formated as Date.

I have repeated your actions and all works fine.

"caldog" wrote:

After re-reading my post I think I have left out some information. So here
goes.

In Book 1 I have named the range Dates
In Book 2 I have gone and done the following: Insert/Name/Define. Created a
new name [Date], and then in the refers to box typed this: =Book1.xls!Dates.
Now went to Data Validation option and selected list, and typed this =Date.

But again all i see is the following 36879.000 etc.

Steve