{"id":346,"date":"2018-06-27T17:35:03","date_gmt":"2018-06-27T17:35:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/officetuts.net\/excel\/?p=346"},"modified":"2024-03-30T10:48:34","modified_gmt":"2024-03-30T10:48:34","slug":"how-excel-stores-date-and-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/officetuts.net\/excel\/training\/how-excel-stores-date-and-time\/","title":{"rendered":"How Excel Stores Date and Time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>If you want to use date and time efficiently in Excel, you first have to learn how Excel stores these values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At first, it may seem that Excel stores dates and times as text values (for example&nbsp;<strong>January 12, 2014<\/strong>).&nbsp;In fact, these values are nothing but numbers, formatted in a way that is easily recognizable by a person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"format wp-block-heading\">Date<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>The date is stored as an integer. Excel starts counting dates from&nbsp;<strong>January 1, 1900 24:00:00<\/strong>, so the number 1 is treated as&nbsp;<strong>January 1, 1900<\/strong>, 2 is treated as&nbsp;<strong>January 2,<\/strong><strong>&nbsp;1900&nbsp;<\/strong>and so on. Look at the following example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"format wp-block-heading\">Example 1:<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><em>January 1, 1900 = 1&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>January 3, 1900 = 3&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>February 2, 1901 = 399&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>March 1, 2014 = 41699<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"format wp-block-heading\">Time<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>While the date is stored as an integer, time is stored as a <a href=\"https:\/\/officetuts.net\/excel\/training\/simple-fractions-and-decimals-fractions\/\">decimal fraction<\/a>. You can find a few examples below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"format wp-block-heading\">Example 2:<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><em>24:00:00 = 0&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>12:00:00 = 0.5&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>11:00:00 p.m. = 0.958333333&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>11:59:59 p.m. = 0.999988426<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When a cell contains both the date and time, then the date will be represented by a total and the time by a fractional part of the number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"format wp-block-heading\">Example 3:<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><em>March 5th, 1920 13:51 = 7370.577731<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>December 11, 2000 18:11 = 36871.75803<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you want to use date and time efficiently in Excel, you first have to learn how Excel stores these values. At first,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[190],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>How Excel Stores Date and Time<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Learn how Excel stores date and time values efficiently. 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