Windows Forum
When calculating times differences in Excel I always get "Negatives dates or times are displayed as ####"
Anyway I can correct this and see my time data as a negative format?
by liame
Its down to the way excel looks at dates. It looks as dates as the number of days after and arbitrary date (1/1/1900 or similar) and simply formats that number to a date.
If you do a calculation involving date fields it tends to assume the answer will be a date and formats the field accordingly. Simply override this by right hand clicking in the cell, choosing format cells and selecting a number format instead of a date format.
by dc_guy
I've never run across it because apparently I've never done that calculation.
Excel is just about the only Grungeware product that I have any respect for. Except for the infuriating difficulty setting up print formats that is almost universal as soon as you leave the Macintosh world, this is the first halfway serious problem I've heard of in Excel.
It is rather silly to assume that the difference between two dates would be a date rather than an absolute number. Even if it were positive and expressed as a date rather than filled with sharp signs, it still would not be useful.
by liame
Another little oddity with excel and its date handling is if you format 0 as a date.
Unless 1900 was a very odd year and had a zero of January I think its safe to call that a botch.
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