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.
You can use the VALUE function to convert the text to values. You can
use the TYPE function to check the data type of a cell.
Hope this helps.
Rob
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