Microsoft KB Archive/214058

= Days of the week before March 1, 1900 are incorrect in Excel =

Article ID: 214058

Article Last Modified on 1/24/2007

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APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Office Excel 2003
 * Microsoft Excel 2002 Standard Edition
 * Microsoft Excel 2000 Standard Edition
 * Microsoft Excel 2001 for Mac
 * Microsoft Excel 98 for Macintosh
 * Microsoft Excel 97 Standard Edition

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This article was previously published under Q214058





SYMPTOMS
When you use the WEEKDAY function to compute the day of the week for dates before March 1, 1900 in Microsoft Excel 2000, the function returns an incorrect result.

For example, if you use the WEEKDAY function to determine the day of the week for February 16, 1900, Microsoft Excel returns 5, which indicates that February 16 was a Thursday. The function should return 6, because February 16, 1900, was actually a Friday.

When you use the WEEKDAY function to find the day of the week for dates on or after March 1, 1900, the function returns the correct answer.



CAUSE
This problem occurs when the following conditions are true:
 * You use the WEEKDAY function to determine the day of the week for dates before March 1, 1900.
 * You use the 1900 date system.



WORKAROUND
To work around this problem, add one to the result of the formula as in the following example: =WEEKDAY("2/16/1900",1)+1



MORE INFORMATION
When the date system in Microsoft Excel was originally created, it was designed to be fully compatible with date systems used by other spreadsheet programs.

However, in this date system, the year 1900 is incorrectly interpreted as a leap year. Because there is no February 29 ("leap day") in the year 1900, the day of the week for any date before March 1, 1900 (the day after the "leap day"), is not computed correctly.

Note that this only affects dates before March 1, 1900, and that the error only occurs when you use the 1900 Date System in Microsoft Excel.

This problem does not occur if you are using the 1904 date system. When you use the 1904 date system and the WEEKDAY function to compute the day of the week for dates prior to January 1, 1904, the function returns a #VALUE! error.

Additional query words: year2000 y2k week day XL2000

Keywords: kbpending kbprb KB214058

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