Hang on, wouldn’t it be January 1, 1900 at noon?
NO, YOU IDIOT USER!!! YOU MEAN MONTH 1 AND DATE 2!!!
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BECAUSE I SAY SO, THAT’S WHO!!!
history channel guy
“datatypes”
I have on firm authority I just updated A1 to be Date format, then typed in ONE HALF and it returned as follows:
1/0/1900 12:00:00 PM
Do you even excel, bro?
Also, wtf day is 1/0/1900, seems I also don’t excel, bro
Interestingly -1 just gives a whole lot of #, clearly that is the forsaken realm
Anytime I debug a serious macro that doesn’t start with Option Explicit, I give a deep sigh and hope the Excel gods are in a good mood.
I see it as a glass that’s twice as big as it needs to be.
But if you copy and past that as value, it reverts back to “-1”
If you type 367, you get 1/1/1901 0:00
367.25 gets 1/1/1901 6:00
Apparently if you go into a black hole time and space reverse, or something. I like to imagine that’s what all the # represent when I enter -1
I’m also fond of seeing Option Base 1 or Option Base 0 too
Does excel recognize dates before 1/1/1900? If not, 1/1/1900 (minus) one day is like dividing by zero.
No, and it’s absurd that they still don’t do this.
ETA: if you input 12/31/1899 as “0” all of the date functions will work, but it will display as 1/0/1900. So if you had a legit need to use 12/31/1899 as a date you have a workaround. But definitely nothing before 12/31/1899.
I can’t believe I didn’t know this!
Excel also counts 1900 as a leap year even though it isn’t, it has remained because it might cause more issues to change it.
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I recall reading that they initially had it correct: that 1900 was NOT a leap year. But the then much more popular Lotus 123 had it wrong and Microsoft wanted Excel to be compatible so they purposely introduced the error, knowing that it was wrong. But to be compatible they had to, or every date would be off by one day when you went back & forth.
At this point they could correct it by making 1 = 12/31/1899 instead of 1 = 1/1/1900. That would mean that only 60 days of human history would change values in Excel.
And they could flipping start allowing negative numbers too so that we could have dates pre-1900 at the same time.
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It grimly amuses me the amount of time I spent on dealing with dates in Excel in my UConn computing for ActSci students class.
I could probably dig up the assignment, but I wouldn’t be surprised if current instructors are still using my old materials…
wtf
I’ve had this happen multiple times and it’s so frustrating.
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