T
Terry
There seems to be a major bug in Excel 2007 vis-a-vis Excel 2003 with
respect to how date formats are handled. I frequently open and edit dbf
files (dBase III) in Excel and version 2007 has a problem in handling dates
in such files.
Here's my setup : Regional Settings : English (US) and Short Date Format :
dd-MMM-yy
The dbf files have a date format of dd/MM/yyyy ( i.e. UK format)
When I used to open these files in Excel 2003, the date format shown would
be identical to that in the dbf files (dd/MM/yyyy). Now with Excel 2007,
some dates appear as MM-dd-yy (with dashes instead of slashes and format
changed to US) and others appear as a string of numbers with an error
comment showing that these are numbers formatted as text. After a lot of
trial and error, it appears to me that those dates where both the day and
the month is less than or equal to 12 appear as MM-dd-yy and in all other
cases they appear as numbers formatted as text.
For example, a date in my dbf file listed as 05/06/1984 appears as 06-05-84
while a date of 31/01/1986 appears as a text value of 19860131.
I cannot understand why this is happening with Excel 2007 since Excel 2003
was able to import the data from the dbf files in the exact format and I
have made no changes in my Regional Settings.
Help anyone ??
respect to how date formats are handled. I frequently open and edit dbf
files (dBase III) in Excel and version 2007 has a problem in handling dates
in such files.
Here's my setup : Regional Settings : English (US) and Short Date Format :
dd-MMM-yy
The dbf files have a date format of dd/MM/yyyy ( i.e. UK format)
When I used to open these files in Excel 2003, the date format shown would
be identical to that in the dbf files (dd/MM/yyyy). Now with Excel 2007,
some dates appear as MM-dd-yy (with dashes instead of slashes and format
changed to US) and others appear as a string of numbers with an error
comment showing that these are numbers formatted as text. After a lot of
trial and error, it appears to me that those dates where both the day and
the month is less than or equal to 12 appear as MM-dd-yy and in all other
cases they appear as numbers formatted as text.
For example, a date in my dbf file listed as 05/06/1984 appears as 06-05-84
while a date of 31/01/1986 appears as a text value of 19860131.
I cannot understand why this is happening with Excel 2007 since Excel 2003
was able to import the data from the dbf files in the exact format and I
have made no changes in my Regional Settings.
Help anyone ??