date operations in Excel 2003

B

bernard

Are you aware of a problem making operations on excel 2003 dates ? even if
the cell format is Date , a comparison of dates (like is 21/08/2004 >
22/08/2004) gives incorrect results and no error message. If you edit the
cell containing the date by pressing F2 and immediately Enter, than the
formula gives the correct result.
Any idea ?
 
F

Frank Kabel

Hi
this is probably due to the fact that your current values are not really
stored as dates. Do you import these date values?
 
A

Arvi Laanemets

This is neither a problem and neither bound to Excel2003. And at start you
don't have dates there - you have text strings instead. When you had date
entered as text, and after that formatted the cell as date, the entry
remains a string. You have to re-enter it (what you did pressing F2 and then
enter), or you have to do some mathematical operation on cell, which
converts the string to number/date, but leaver the date unchanged (multply
with 1, or add 0). To do so, format cell(s) as general/number/date, enter 1
to some General/Numeric format cell and copy it (or copy an empty cell, or
cell with number 0 in it), select cell/range with datestrings, and then use
PasteSpecial with Multiply (or Add) on it.
 
D

Dave Peterson

Another warning.

You may have a mixture of dates and non-dates.

21/08/2004 can't be interpretted as a date in mdy format
(it's aug 21, 2004 in dmy)

But if you have a cell that looks like:
12/08/2004
you may have a real date of Dec 8, 2004--not Aug 12, 2004.

If you're importing a text file, you may want to reimport and specify dmy for
that field type.

(And if you're opening a .csv file, rename it to .txt--so you see the text to
columns wizard.)
 
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