Excel not recognizing Dates properly.
 

I have a spreadsheet that has a column of dates exported
from a website. The user is trying to add 1 day to the
date and put it in another colunm...

ei: =A1 + 1

This works fine for most of the however, some of the give
the #value error. After playing around with them I
realized that Excel seems to be treating the dates as
strings, when I try to format them as numbers or dates,
they never change. Seems that all the dates between month
1 and Month 4 dont change but all the other dates get
formated correctly. Now the real tricky part comes next.
If I put my cursor in the field (as if I am editing it)
then press enter or 'tab' out Excel seems to then see it
as a date and formats it properly...

ie. Value is 3/16/2005. I enter the field, press tab, and
once focus is gone from that cell it gets formated
correctly.

This isnt really a pressing issue, but I must be missing
something really simple.

This often happens with data pasted in from web sites. To coerce the
"text numbers" into numbers, copy an empty cell. Select your text
numbers, then choose Edit/Paste Special, selecting the Values and Add
radio buttons. Click OK. You will probably then need to reformat...


In article ,
"Dan" wrote:

I have a spreadsheet that has a column of dates exported
from a website. The user is trying to add 1 day to the
date and put it in another colunm...

ei: =A1 + 1

This works fine for most of the however, some of the give
the #value error. After playing around with them I
realized that Excel seems to be treating the dates as
strings, when I try to format them as numbers or dates,
they never change. Seems that all the dates between month
1 and Month 4 dont change but all the other dates get
formated correctly. Now the real tricky part comes next.
If I put my cursor in the field (as if I am editing it)
then press enter or 'tab' out Excel seems to then see it
as a date and formats it properly...

ie. Value is 3/16/2005. I enter the field, press tab, and
once focus is gone from that cell it gets formated
correctly.

This isnt really a pressing issue, but I must be missing
something really simple.