This entry was posted in tech and tagged date, excel, leap year, worksheet. If you care, you can read a few more gory details on this Microsoft article on the date system.
#Using excel on mac vs pc Pc#
Your PC originated spreadsheet and your Mac originated spreadsheet will now match. If you’d like to conform your Mac spreadsheet to the PC system, simply open up Preferences->Calculation->Workbook Options an uncheck “1904 Date System”: Why the one day? Apparently that came down to a leap-year related difference between the two systems.įortunately, it’s easy to fix. If, however, you happen to make a new spreadsheet on that mac and cut-and-paste the dates to that new sheet, you’ll notice that the dates are off by 4 years and 1 day. So, if you open a PC originated spreadsheet on a mac, it automatically uses the PC starting date (1900). Not surprisingly, this can cause problems between the two systems. When you write a date in excel, it stores the date as the number of days that have passed since either (on the PC) or since (on the Mac). It took a little while to figure out why this was happening.įirst, a little background. You’ll notice that the dates are off by exactly 4 years and 1 day after a simple cut-and-paste into a fresh spreadsheet.
![using excel on mac vs pc using excel on mac vs pc](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/lineups/04Xk0kh8NmNgGtEBrqoH9RV-1..v1581543078.jpg)
See if you can spot the difference between the original on the left and the new spreadsheet on the right: I needed to create a copy of part of a spreadsheet into a new sheet. I discovered an amazing “bug” in excel tonight.