How do I convert excel date serial numbers to Numbers dates

I would have thought this would have been fixed in 3.1 but it was not. We have no idea whether or not Apple has any intention of fixing it. I'd guess yes.

I think someone said they didn't have the problem with xls files, just xlsx files. I have never been able to reproduce the problem.

Could you give a screenshot of how the dates look in Excel and what you get in Numbers?

And how are you importing into Numbers? File > Open an xls file? File > Open an xlsx file? File > Open a cvs file? Or copying and pasting?

With enough specifics I'm guessing it won't be too hard to come up with a workaround that will save you hours of work.

SG

It sounds like the problem where dates imported from Excel end up a serial numbers instead of dates. The only workaround that I know of is to add another column to the table and convert them back into dates. Or, if it is true that xls files import correctly but xlsx ones don't, another workaround is to use Excel to convert xlsx files to xls.

The table below shows the relationship between the Excel serial number and the date for the two Excel date systems. To get from serial number to date, you add the serial number to one of the two dates given in column D.

Thanks for that explanation and illustration of Excel dates and serial numbers. I'd never really understood that before. I can't reproduce the date import problem here either, from Excel 2011. Dates import as expected, from both xls and xlsx files. I wonder what triggers the import error.

Aside from saving as xls from Excel and importing xls files into Numbers, another workaround might be to copy the dates from an open Excel worksheet and paste them into the corresponding range in the imported Numbers table.

Numbers 3 sometimes seems to do a better job parsing pasted data than data imported by opening a file. We found, for example, that pasting tab-separated data preserves formats better than opening comma-separated files.

SG