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Excel® 2007 Bible
book

Excel® 2007 Bible

by John Walkenbach
January 2007
Beginner to intermediate
912 pages
21h 53m
English
Wiley
Content preview from Excel® 2007 Bible

Chapter 13. Working with Dates and Times

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Beginners often find that working with dates and times in Excel can be frustrating. To work with dates and times, you need a good understanding of how Excel handles time-based information. This chapter provides the information you need to create powerful formulas that manipulate dates and times.

Note

The dates in this chapter correspond to the United States English date format: month/day/year. For example, the date 3/1/1952 refers to March 1, 1952, not January 3, 1952. I realize that this setup may seem illogical, but that’s the way Americans have been trained. I trust that the non-American readers of this book can make the adjustment.

How Excel Handles Dates and Times

This section presents a quick overview of how Excel deals with dates and times. It includes coverage of the Excel program’s date and time serial number system, and it offers tips for entering and formatting dates and times.

Understanding date serial numbers

To Excel, a date is simply a number. More precisely, a date is a serial number that represents the number of days since the fictitious date of January 0, 1900. A serial number of 1 corresponds to January 1, 1900; a serial number of 2 corresponds to January 2, 1900, and so on. This system makes it possible to deal with dates in formulas. For example, you can create a formula ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780470044032Purchase book