If you change to the 1904 date system, then you'll be able to see negative
times.

But any existing date will be off by 4 years and one day.

This can cause a problem with that workbook--and when you copy|paste between
workbooks.


Saved from a previous post:

One workbook was using a base year of 1900 and the other was using 1904.
(tools|options|calculation tab|1904 date system)

One way to add those four years back is to find an empty cell, put 1462 into
that cell.

Copy that cell.

Select your range that contains the dates.
Edit|PasteSpecial|Click Add (or Subtract) depending on which workbook you want
to fix.

You may have to reformat the cell as a date (mine turned to a 5 digit number).
But it should work.

You may want to do it against a copy...just in case.

Most windows users use 1900 as the base date. Mac users (mostly??) use 1904 as
the base date.



Dave East wrote:

I am creating a timesheet requiring negative time to be shown in the Excel
2007 spreadsheet. I have learnt how to calculate the number of hours worked
and show how many hours have been worked over the contracted hours. This
gives a positive value.

The problem appears when the contracted hours exceeds the actual hours.
This would give a negative value but the spreadsheet shows this as a series
of ############### symbols. It will not show -2 hrs 15 min for example.

Is there a way around this problem, please.

--

Dave Peterson