date formatting

G

Gracie

I selected a cell to be formatted as a date (MS example 03/14/01)

When I key 120199 in that cell it displays in as 02/02/29......Why?
I even went into the Control Panel then Regional Settings for Date.
 
T

Trevor Shuttleworth

Gracie

You need to put in the slashes when you input a date:

12/01/99

If you input something that Excel recognises as a date, it will format the
cell automatically, although it might not be exactly what you want.

Regards

Trevor
 
J

JudithJubilee

Hello Gracie,

Even though you have formatted the cell to be a date you will still have to
type the slashes, ie. 12/01/99.

When you type in a number Excel calculates what the date would be that
number of days since 01/01/1900. So 02/02/29 is really 02/02/2229 which is
120199 days since 01/01/1900.

Judith
 
S

Sloth

Dates are stored as serial numbers. The serial number for February 2nd, 2229
is the number 120199. 120199 represents the number of days from 1/0/1900
(1/1/1900 equals 1). Enter your dates with hyphens "-" or slashes "/". For
more information look in the help under "enter a date", and "How Microsoft
Excel stores dates and times".
 
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