EXCEL - Date

[Margaret N]

I have MS Office 2007 and for some reason when I tried to type 2009 into Excel tonight it would only come up as (1st July).

Any idea's why?

On this spread sheet I have a list of the Base Rates back to 1979 and cannot remember coming across the problem before.

[MarionH]

Margaret,
Have you checked to see how the cells that appear correct are formatted. If you look at them I think they will be "General". The one that is coming up as 1st July I think will show as being "Date".On mine if you don't put in day month and year into a "date formatted" cell it won't show up correctly. Not sure if the 2007 v is different though.
Marion

[WendyPusey]

Just checked on Excell 2007 and Marion is right, you have to set the cell to general rather than date if all you want is the year.

[jaydax]

The cell will do this if it is formatted as date - you actually get 1st July 1905 which is the number of days after Excel's reference date of 1st Jan 1900.
If you want to keep the date format and display years only then enter 1/1/2009 and use a custom date format of yyyy