Yes, no kidding! "The world according to Microsoft" Karen
-----Original Message----- From: Tony IJntema <[email protected]> To: RBASE-L Mailing List <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, Nov 18, 2014 12:57 pm Subject: [RBASE-L] - RE: Problem with Excel recognizing dates Karen, It is a pity, but according to Excel the world began on January 1, 1900. Excel is not capable of working with dates earlier than that. Tony From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Karen Tellef Sent: dinsdag 18 november 2014 18:58 To: RBASE-L Mailing List Subject: [RBASE-L] - Problem with Excel recognizing dates The database holds patents, so it has a wide range of years, from the early 1800s to future expiration dates many years into the future. Excel 2010 apparently still does not recognize pre-1900 dates. I need to import pre-1900 dates, and they have to sort-able with other dates. If I do: SET DATE FORMAT MM/DD/YYYY I can clearly see correct years, going back to the 1800s. When I export, whether as an xls or a csv file, the raw output file looks okay. But Excel does not recognize these pre-1900 items as dates. If you sort, these rows are put at the end all by themselves out of the sort order. I tried creating a TEXT column, changing the date format to YYYY-MM-DD so the text column can be sorted. Then I did a CTXT(datecol) to the text column and exported that instead. Raw data looks good, and of course it sorts okay in RBase as text column. But again Excel tried to outsmart me. It took the YYYY-MM-DD format for the pre-1900 dates, but it "knew" the other rows were dates so it converted them to a date format and therefore cannot sort them together. Please someone tell me how the heck I can tell Excel that these are text fields, just accept them as text fields YYYY-MM-DD so we can sort them, or some other way of getting all these dates in together... This is really critical to the client. Karen
