Dates become numbers

[Karthik-Excelsior]

Hi excel gurus,

Have you ever experienced this - you copy 'Dates' from one Excel sheet and paste them on to another, and the Dates become Numbers.

Sometimes, even after selecting them and choosing 'Currency' format doesn't help. Then, I mostly use the TEXT formula to get the date format.

Any idea, why this conversion happens, and how this can be averted?

Thanks,

Karthik

 

[Domski]

Serial dates in Excel essentially are numbers starting with 1 being 1 Jan 1900 and incrementing from that point. If you format a date such as 18 Jul 2012 as General it will display as 41108. If you convert them to text you will struggle with doing calculations based on the dates.

Dom

 

[Norie]

Dates are stored as numbers in Excel, formatting makes them appear as dates.

So what's probably happened is, somehow, the formatting has been lost.

I don't know why you can't re-format the numbers to dates.

Have you copied to cells formatted as text?