Excel pre 1900 dates

[hallmark]

Open has Macros
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[mike175]

Hard to believe anyone could design a database system which doesn't work with dates, and even harder to believe anyone still uses it when there are more grown-up options 

If you can't upgrade to LibreOffice which does these things so much better, you might try:

   http://www.exceluser.com/formulas/earlydates.htm

Mike.

[Billyblue]

Format either General or Text?

Annie

Yes, set Number Format to General is the way to go.
It works OK for me (Excel 2007).  Sometimes it flips itself out of General but it's easy to reset.

Dawn M

[hallmark]

Hard to believe anyone could design a database system which doesn't work with dates, and even harder to believe anyone still uses it when there are more grown-up options 

If you can't upgrade to LibreOffice which does these things so much better, you might try:

   http://www.exceluser.com/formulas/earlydates.htm

Mike.

It's only a matter of downloading OpenOffice, then starting Calc, Open File and select an existing Excel File and see how well OpenOffice works and still have the .xls file

Any changes made can still be saved as  .xls so Excel can open them if needed.

[Mike Morrell (NL)]

Formatting as General or Text is probably the way to go but any specific date-related functions, filters, sorts, etc. won't be available. An option might be to split date columns formated as geneneral or text out into separate year, month and day columns (formatted as text or numbers). Depending on your database, this may make easier or more difficult to work with.

See for example https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/2016/06/01/split-text-string-excel/.

[mike175]

Sorry, I'm getting confused (not unusual). Excel is NOT a database program even though many people seem to think it is, but that does not excuse it from formatting dates properly.

Mike.