On 27 Apr 2005, at 11:30 PM, Alex Novakovic wrote:
Now for the evil empire. I have imported some dates into a
spreadsheet and when I tried to sort them into date order I get
something like this: 1,11,19,2,21,22,23 etc with no regard to the
month. I tried formatting as a date field and a text field - same
result.
Also having problem getting it to format as dd/m/yy which I can only
do as a Custom format (not available in the date format list!!) Some
dates come out OK but others (I think in the earlier part of the
month) are switched back to front in month/day/year.
Hi Alex,
When you enter a date in an Excel cell it stores it as a number, being
the number of days since Jan 1 1904. Times are entered as a decimal
fraction of a day. This means you can perform calculations, like
finding how many days there are between two dates. Try typing in your
birthday and formatting it as "dddd" you will get the day of the week
you were born.
If you import dates from another program, the dates may be imported as
text. It all depends on the program you imported from. It looks as
though the dates in your case are imported as text. This means that
sorting and calculations between dates will not work properly. Either
you have to live with it, or you have to retype in the date in each
cell.
One quirk I found some years ago was that dates imported from Excel for
Windoze were wrong. This was because day number 1 was 1 Jan 1900, so
they were 4 years out. I don't know if this is still a problem.
Regards,
John Taylor
