Copying dates

[srananmeitie]

Hi,

I am doing a VLookup between 2 sheets, where a date ("4-march-98"format) should be copied from sheet 2 to sheet 1. The specification for the function is correct, only Excel copies the date as a number (i.e. 16-dec-1993 will be copied as 34319).
I am not sure where and how to change this.

Another problem I am having is:
When there is no match, it either display 0 (when there was no date specified for that matching pair) or it will display N/A when the value to be looked up doesnt exist on the VLookup table. Any tips on how to get rid of that? If there is no date value associated with my lookup value, I'd like the cell to stay blank.


Any help would be greatly appreciated =)

 

[Tazguy37]

Dates are numbers, to Excel. It's only the formatting that makes them look like dates. You could use the TEXT() function to format the result however you want.

For hiding errors, you can either use a =IF(A1="","",VLOOKUP(... formula or see this link on conditional formatting.

Hope that helps!