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From: derosa@motcid.UUCP (John DeRosa)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: Date Strings in Excel?
Message-ID: <6240@crystal9.UUCP>
Date: 22 Apr 91 21:49:35 GMT
References: <6224@crystal9.UUCP>
Distribution: comp
Organization: Motorola Inc., Cellular Infrastructure Div., Arlington Heights, IL
Lines: 45

derosa@motcid.UUCP (John DeRosa) writes:

>I would like to be able to enter a date 
>string of April 24, 1991 into an Excel
>cell.  Unfortunately, Excel keeps converting
>it to another format.

Well, the adage RTFM comes to mind.  Several
people told me that formatting dates is no 
quite intuitive, so after reading the manual
I came up with this simple chart of formatting
possibilities.

If the input string is December 1, 1991 then;

Format             Results
======             =======
m d, yyyy          12 1, 1991
mm d, yyyy         12 1, 1991
mmm d, yyyy        Dec 1, 1991
mmm dd, yyyy       Dec 01, 1991
mmmm d, yyyy       December 1, 1991
mmmm dd, yyyy      December 01, 1991
mmmm ddd, yyyy     December Sun, 1991
mmmm dddd, yyyy    December Sunday, 1991
mmmmm d, yyyy      December12 1, 1991

The ultimate format might be;

dddd, mmmm d, yyyy    Sunday, December 1, 1991

It seems a bit odd that the month "May"
formated with four m's, mmmm, would still
produce "May", not "May " but this is 
Microsoft.

This leads to my real question, how do you
format a cell so that *ANY* information 
entered into a cell is not altered in any
way?
-- 
=       John DeRosa, Motorola, Inc, Cellular Infrastructure Group          =
= e-mail:    ...uunet!motcid!derosaj, motcid!derosaj@uunet.uu.net          =
= Applelink: N1111                                                         =
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