Well, no wonder you got the "developer of the year". I'll be darned -- you're right on this one! If I bring up their spreadsheet and change the format to mm/dd/yyyy (the one with the asterisk by it, as you say), then the dates come right in! I'm sure they'll be able to change the format of that column.
Good detective work!
Karen
Karen,
I haven't had any trouble with dates so I did a quick test. I created a spreadsheet with two columns (test.xls). In the first column I typed in a series of dates. I did not specify a format for the column, I just typed dates. When I looked at the format of the cells, Excel assumed the default date format of mm/dd/yyyy. I created a temporary table with two columns, one date and one text (called TESTING). Note my date format in RBase is mm/dd/yy. I ran:
GATEWAY IMPORT XLS test.xls REPLACE testing
The dates imported properly and displayed mm/dd/yy.
I changed the date format in the Excel spreadsheet to mm/dd/yy and reran the import. The dates did not import at all.
There is a notation in Excel that says "Date formats display date and time serial numbers as date values. Except for items that have an asterisk (*), applied formats do not switch date orders with the operating system."
Now, the mm/dd/yyyy format has an asterisk, the mm/dd/yy format does not. Maybe that has something to do with the problem.
