MacLochlainns Weblog

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.