Ok, something I'm pondering here and hope that someone might be able to enlighten me on the subject.

Supposedly my dept's systems have been remediated, however I'm coming across an issue that I'm curious about:

I have an Excel spreadsheet where I track dataprocessed - one of the fields is a date field that I manually key the date in.

When there is no data entered in that day, I key in a "0" in the date field. Because of the date-mask in that field, a date will still be generated. In this case, instead of 01/01/2000 popping up, I'm getting a 01/00/1900.

Again, this is happening in a system where supposedly both the BIOS have been remediated and MSN's software patches have been downloaded.

My system specs: Microsoft Windows 95 Version: 4.00.950

Excel: Microsoft Excel 97 No version number given

Thanks!

-- Deb M. (vmcclell@columbus.rr.com), November 29, 1999

Answers

Deb:

Don't ask these pesky questions. If we all think positive, it will all be fine.........

Anyway, won't you know that any of those 1900 dates *really* are 2000 dates? What's the big fuss?

*sigh*

Keep on prepping, get those rabbits!!

-- mushroom (mushroom_bs_too_long@yahoo.com), November 29, 1999.

This is a bug even in Excel 2000, retained apparently for backwards compatibility! The date should read 12/30/1899! When the Excel date numbering system was developed it erroneously included 02/29/1900 as a valid date. You can key 60 into a date formatted field and retrieve this non-existent date. None of the dates in January or February 1900 have correct day numbers. Because of this Y1900 bug apparently the 1904 date numbering system was developed. I don't believe it ever caught on. So you see even Office2000 still has systemic date problems!

-- Slobby Don (slobbydon@hotmail.com), November 29, 1999.

Don't worry - it only happens in Microsoft products and Intel products that have odd-numbered operating systems or version numbers......everybody who runs Windows 2.0 on DOS 6.22 on a 286 or 486 is okay.

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), November 29, 1999.

This has nothing to do with remediation, or Y2k at all.

By default, Excel stores "dates" as a serialized number, beginning January 1, 1900, as serial number 1.

Entering a pure number in the field will generate a date, representing the number of days since. For example, entering '33333' results in March 5, 1991.

Entering '0' results in an invalid date, or Jan 00, 1900, since serial '1' represents Jan 1, 1900.

If for some reason you need '0' to be a "valid" date, you can change Excel to use the 1904 date system, which has as serial '1' Jan 02, 1904. Thus, '0' becomes Jan 01, 1904.

This is set through the "Tools-->Options" path. Select the "Calculations" tab.

Why you would expect '0' to convert to 01/01/2000 is beyond me.

-- Hoffmeister (hoff_meister@my-deja.com), November 29, 1999.

Hello. Thank you for your response, I know very little about how information (dates)is stored and appreciate any information that can be passed along.

I had thought that the 01/00/1900 might be some sort of numeric default that was supposed to be fixed when remediation was done. I wasn't sure if this was remediation issue or if was just something I didn't understand.

-- Deb M. (vmcclell@columbus.rr.com), November 29, 1999.