Retrieving Dates From Excel

[mavest]

Does anyone know how Excel stores its data? I would like to guarantee that what my customer in Germany enters as a date in a cell will be retrieved by me (in the US) exactly as my German client entered it.

Example:

G Client enters using a VBA macro:
worksheets("Sheet1&quot.cells(1,1).value = "9/3/2003"

viewed in european format as 09-Mar-2003

G Client sends me the Excel workbook:

Obviously in US format I would view this as 03-SEP-2003 (which is wrong), but I do not want to view it in Excel. I want to retrieve it with an OLE action from another application.

Does anyone know that when Excel stores "9/3/2003" does it store it exactly as the given string or does it convert it to a date or time and store that?? I want to insure that my application will retrieve "9/3/2003" when it retrieves the value of cell(1,1), so that I can do the european to us date conversion myself.

Thanks for your help!!

-Mike

 

[RobBroekhuis]

The date is stored in Excel as a numerical value (try applying the "general" number format to a cell with a date or time value). So the data does not depend on the international settings, although of course the presentation on-screen will change.
Rob