hi
this is what i find noteable
When Lotus 1-2-3 was first released, the program assumed that the year
1900 was a leap year, even though it actually was not a leap year.
This made it easier for the program to handle leap years and caused no
harm to almost all date calculations in Lotus 1-2-3.
When Microsoft Multiplan and Microsoft Excel were released, they also
assumed that 1900 was a leap year. This assumption allowed Microsoft
Multiplan and Microsoft Excel to use the same serial date system used
by Lotus 1-2-3 and provide greater compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3.
Treating 1900 as a leap year also made it easier for users to move
worksheets from one program to the other.
Although it is technically possible to correct this behavior so that
current versions of Microsoft Excel do not assume that 1900 is a leap
year, the disadvantages of doing so outweigh the advantages.
If this behavior were to be corrected, many problems would arise,
including the following:
* Almost all dates in current Microsoft Excel worksheets and other
documents would be decreased by one day. Correcting this shift would
take considerable time and effort, especially in formulas that use
dates.
* Some functions, such as the WEEKDAY function, would return
different values; this might cause formulas in worksheets to work
incorrectly.
* Correcting this behavior would break serial date compatibility
between Microsoft Excel and other programs that use dates.
If the behavior remains uncorrected, only one problem occurs:
* The WEEKDAY function returns incorrect values for dates before
March 1, 1900. Because most users do not use dates before March 1,
1900, this problem is rare.
NOTE: Microsoft Excel correctly handles all other leap years,
including century years that are not leap years (for example, 2100).
Only the year 1900 is incorrectly handled.
On 26/01/2010, Ayush <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Dear members,
>
> Are you aware of this bug ? any comments ?
>
> A leap year, which occurs every four years, contains an additional day
> (February 29).
> Although the year 1900 was not a leap year, Excel treats it as such.
> In other words,
> when you type 2/29/1900 into a cell, Excel does not complain. It
> interprets this as
> a valid date and assigns a serial number of 60.
> If you type 2/29/1901, however, Excel correctly interprets it as a
> mistake and
> doesn’t convert it to a date. Rather, it simply makes the cell entry a
> text string.
> How can a product used daily by millions of people contain such an
> obvious bug?
> The answer is historical. The original version of Lotus 1-2-3
> contained a bug that
> caused it to consider 1900 as a leap year. When Excel was released
> some time later,
> the designers knew of this bug and chose to reproduce it in Excel to
> maintain compatibility
> with Lotus worksheet files.
> Why does this bug still exist in later versions of Excel? Microsoft
> asserts that the
> disadvantages of correcting this bug outweigh the advantages. If the
> bug were eliminated,
> it would mess up hundreds of thousands of existing workbooks. In
> addition,
> correcting this problem would affect compatibility between Excel and
> other programs
> that use dates. As it stands, this bug really causes very few problems
> because most users do not use dates before March 1, 1900.
>
> Best regards,
> Ayush Jain[Group Owner]
>
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
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--
Have A Nice Time & Enjoy Life
Regards:
CMA Ankur Pandey
(Someone Different)
I'm not the best but i'm not like the rest~~
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some important links for excel users:
1. Follow us on TWITTER for tips tricks and links :
http://twitter.com/exceldailytip
2. Excel and VBA Tutorials(Video and Text), Free add-ins downloads at
http://www.excelitems.com
3. Excel tutorials at http://www.excel-macros.blogspot.com
4. Learn VBA Macros at http://www.quickvba.blogspot.com
5. Excel Tips and Tricks at http://exceldailytip.blogspot.com
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
If you find any spam message in the group, please send an email to:
Ayush Jain @ [email protected]
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
HELP US GROW !!
We reach over 6,700 subscribers worldwide and receive many nice notes about the
learning and support from the group.Let friends and co-workers know they can
subscribe to group at http://groups.google.com/group/excel-macros/subscribe
