Using Dates Within Excel

Dates can be daunting for the beginner within Excel, particularly as Excel stores dates as decimal numbers and not actual dates. This is due to the fact that many people need to use date cells within formulas. A simple example would be a worksheet where there are two columns, one as a start date of a project and the next as an end date. If someone needed to calculate the length of a project then they could use a formula to easily find the total project time. Excel stores dates as numbers so these calculations can be performed. This does mean that you will need to consider date formats when using dates within your worksheet. If you accidentally format the column as number type then all your dates will appear as meaningless numbers!

The full article appears here:
http://www.microsofttraining.net/article-749-using-dates-within-excel.html

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The Microsoft Training Blog Team
http://microsoft-training.blogspot.com