I would also verify whether you want the DAYS360 function. I'll bet not.
Days360 will return 30 days between Feb 1st and March 1st of any year. If
you want the proper number of days, just subtract, as in:

=b1-a1

Regards,
Fred.

"yesterdaytoday11" wrote in
message ...
thanks, this helped alot with our dates formatted like 20070703 for
7/1/2007
with a little editing to
=DATE(LEFT(A9,4),MID(A9,5,2),RIGHT(A9,2)). Now I can use DAYS360 to
compare
with dates in the MM/DD/YYYY format

"T. Valko" wrote:

You can convert the numeric string to a date like this.

the year is one digit in the source data
Assuming the year is *always* in the 2000 decade

A1 = 10501
B1 = 5/1/2001

=DATE(2000+LEFT(A1),MID(A1,2,2),RIGHT(A1,2))

Returns 5/1/2001

So, to comapre the 2 dates:

=DATE(2000+LEFT(A1),MID(A1,2,2),RIGHT(A1,2))=B1

--
Biff
Microsoft Excel MVP


"botany_girl" wrote in message
...
Hello!

I have a worksheet containing two datasets. Each set of data has
associated
dates--but they are entered as different numbers. One set has the date
in
format ymmdd as a number, i.e. 10501 represents May 1, 2001 (the year
is
one
digit in the source data). The other set has the date entered as a
date,
i.e. 5/1/2001. I have the columns set up so that they display the same
numbers, but the original data within the columns is formatted
differently.

I have to look at the data to make sure that the values in the two
columns
match. However, it's a huge dataset, so doing this manually is going
to
take
a long time. I wanted to insert a logical argument
[=IF(value1=value2,true,false] in a separate column to save time, but
since
the source data are in different formats, I get a FALSE every time.

Any ideas on how I convert these beasts into identical formats so that
I
can
use the logical argument strategy? The displayed numbers must not be
changed
to the odd Excel date-counting format, unfortunately--if that were the
case
it wouldn't be so difficult.

Thanks for any suggestions,

lisa