year formula returning incorrect value

[dbdewitt]

As I understand it, the YEAR formula should return the year to which the
formula relates. I have a date of 4/24/2008 in a cell (let's say it's in
cell B2), when I enter the formula (let's say in cell A2) "=YEAR(B2)", the
result is 1905 where the result should be 2008. Can someone tell me what I'm
missing?

 

[Peo Sjoblom]

The serial number for this particular date is


39562


if you change the format from date to general what do you get?

For year 1905 the serial number would be between 1828 and 2192


serial number is the number of days since Jan 0 1900 given that Excel AD
starts then (at least for Windows)

--


Regards,


Peo Sjoblom

 

[Mike H]

Hi,

=Year(B2) would return 2008 if B2 contained a correctly formatted 2008
date. If it wasn't correctly formatted then I'd expect it to return either
1900 or 1904 depending on which date system you had set in your options. If
it's returning 1905 then that's odd and suggests B2 has a value in the range
of 1828 - 2192 in it, are you sure that's correct and not a typo?

Mike

 

[dbdewitt]

(Found it)...The format of the cell where the formula is (in this case A2),
needs to be something other than a date (i.e. general or number).

 

[David Biddulph]

Your problem is that you forgot that YEAR returns the 2008 as a number, not
as an Excel date. You should have the cell formatted as general or number,
but instead you formatted the cell as a date in yyyy format. The number
2008 would be Excel's representation of a date 2008 days on from the
beginning of January 1900. 2008 days on gets you to 30th June 1905, and you
have asked it to display that number in yyyy format.

If all you wanted to do was to display 4/24/2008 in yyyy format, you didn't
need the YEAR() function, you could merely have formatted the cell (B2
itself, or a cell containing the formula =B2) to display that way.

Either use =YEAR() and format as General or Number
Or use formatting as yyyy
Or use =TEXT(B2,"yyyy") to return 2008 as text
Or use =--TEXT(B2,"yyyy") as another way to return 2008 as a number

If you try to mix and match without remembering whether your cell contains a
number or an Excel date, you can readily get confused, as you found out.

 

[muddan madhu]

I guess the date is fine but the cell A2 is been formatted as "yyyy"
for this reason it is giving 1905 instead of 2008.
change to general category ....