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Dates unequal between Excel 2007 & 2008

with one comment

I was doing some cross product testing between Excel 2007 (PC) and Excel 2008 (Mac) and got a big surprise! The number representing a date differs by 1,462. Excel 2007 starts using integers at 1 equal to 1-Jan-1900, but Excel 2008 starts with 0 equal to 1-Jan-1904. It clearly means that dates should be uploaded as formatted strings rather than numbers when loading them into a database. That also appears to mean any shared computations linked to dates across a collection of PC and Mac computers fails unless you account for the difference. I’ve updated that earlier post on what’s true with the details.

Written by maclochlainn

November 25th, 2008 at 6:00 pm