The =text() will make the cell look like a date, but it's really text. You may
find that some of your date arithmetic may not work the way you want.

The -- stuff coerces the text that looks like a date to a real number. But
unless you apply a nice numberformat, you'll end up with something that looks
like:

39750.3908
or
39750.3907986111
when you look at lots of decimals.

Try changing the numberformat (format|cells|number tab in xl2003 menus) and
you'll probably be happier.


BDT wrote:

Thanks everybody.

The formula:

=--TEXT(A1,"0000-00-00 00\:00\:00")

worked fine when I deleted the 2 minus signs after the equal sign and the
other one:

=DATE(LEFT(A1,4),MID(A1,5,2),MID(A1,7,2))+TIME(MID (A1,9,2),MID(A1,11,2),RIGHT(A1,2))

generated just the date which might be helpfull. But I couldn't get the
Custom format to work with yyyy/mm/dd hh:mm:ss or mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss. These
just return an infinite row of # signs as wide as you set the column width.

thanks again, BDT

--

Dave Peterson