Thank you. That worked, but it converted to date to a serial number. Can I
get it back into a date format (mm/dd/yyyy)?

"Gary''s Student" wrote:

With 1997 in A1, use:
=DATE(A1,1,1)
--
Gary''s Student - gsnu200859


"silly_jem" wrote:

I would like to convert a number to a the first day of a year, i.e., 1997 to
01/01/1997. How do I do this? I know how to create text that LOOKS like
this [=TEXT(a1,"01\/01\/0000")], but it seems like this is a text format and
not a date format, so I can't use this "date" to subtract from another date
(to calculate the time interval between two dates).

Can you help me?