Hi John:
If you Google for it, you will find you are not alone
Simplistically: The 1904 system is the native Mac OS date system. Excel
was first created for the Mac, and simply used the system date format.
When Excel was ported to the PC, it was very much the minority player. It
had savage competition from two other spreadsheets, one of which was Lotus
1-2-3.
Lotus was the dominant player, and it had chosen the 1900 date system. In
order to compete, Excel had to implement the 1900 date system so it could
produce spreadsheets compatible with 1-2-3.
Worse: The Lotus 1-2-3 date system had a bug in it. It treated 1900 as a
leap year, when it wasn't. So Microsoft's version of the 1900 date system
implements the Lotus 1-2-3 bug, for compatibility...
See here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/180162
Of course, if you were to use the Chinese calendar, the problem would go
away. There's a brief description of it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_calendar
Which makes this year 4706 and you have to plug in a series of leap-months
Cheers
Hi John;
Which Date System the workbook file uses [except in some special cases] is
irrelevant unless you either:
(A) Copy & paste dates to/from another file which uses the other date
system, or
(B) Change the workbook file's date system preference *after* dates have
already been entered.
Otherwise there is no incompatibility or disparity when using any version of
Excel to Open & revise files nor does the date system of the workbook have
any influence on how dates are entered.
The Preference setting is a *workbook* specification, not a global default
for the program. What concerns me is your point (2) ‹ the default for new
workbooks in Mac Excel is and always has been1904. Are you currently using
a custom workbook template? I don't understand how you "lost" half a day.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214330/en-us?spid=2513&sid=global
HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac
I have excel 2008.
(1) Â the calculation preference is set to NOT use the1904date system
(and the person(s) who made the decision to have different date
systems for windows and mac excel should be, uh, severely chastised!)
(2) if I open a new workbook, the1904date system is not selected
(3) if I open a comma delimited text file by either drag and drop or
open, comma delimited, the1904date system is checked.
I just lost the better part of a day because I didn't notice this
glitch early in the process.
Any ideas on how to prevent this?
thanks.
Thanks for the responses.
The half day I lost was in redoing the work to correct my 1900/1904
error. As usual, it was a PBKAC problem.
As an end user that thought Visicalc was a great improvement over
PeachCalc, I view the 1900/1904 disparity as just another way for
something to go wrong. It's been stated that they should be lauded
for the 1904 decision. If there is a general and reasonably short
write up on why the decision was made, I would be interested in
reading it.
Thanks for the help.
This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!
--
John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:
[email protected]