Happy Excel Day 44000

Happy Excel Day 44000

Since you love Excel, you probably already noticed that today (June 15, 2020), is Excel day 44000. You’ll see that if you type today’s date in a worksheet cell, and then change the number format to General, because Excel stores dates as numbers.

Celebrating Excel Milestones

The first Excel milestone that we celebrated, here on the Contextures Blog, was Excel Day 40000, way back on July 6, 2009. We were so young and carefree, in those olden days!

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There are been other celebrations since then, every 1000 days or so. Here’s a list of the Excel milestone days, if you’re using Excel on a Windows system.

For Windows machines, Excel’s default date system starts on January 1, 1900 (day 1), so today is day 44,000

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Dates in Excel for Mac

If you’re using Excel for Mac, the default date system starts at January 1, 1904 (day 0), so the milestone dates are about 4 years behind.

Here’s the list of Excel milestone days for the 1904 date system. Start making your party plans for Excel Day 43000, on September 23, 2021!

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Different Date Systems

Excel’s two date systems are explained in this document on the Microsoft site: Description of the differences between the 1900 date system and the 1904 date system in Excel.

In Excel, you can switch to a different date system, in any workbook. Follow these steps to switch to the 1904 Date System in Excel for Windows:

  1. On the Excel Ribbon, click File, then click Options
  2. At the left, click the Advanced category
  3. Scroll down to the section titled, When calculating this workbook
  4. Add a check mark to Use 1904 date system.
  5. Click OK

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How Old is Excel?

Even though it’s Excel Day 44000, Excel isn’t that old.

Microsoft released the first version of Excel (for the Mac only) on September 30, 1985.

That was day 31320 in the Excel date system (1900-based), which was 12680 days ago.

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Next Excel Milestone

The good news is that we don’t have to wait another 1000 days until the next Excel milestone.

Obviously, we should also celebrate Excel day 44444, which falls on Sunday, September 5, 2021.

Have your party hats and noisemakers ready, and we’ll do something special FOUR that day too!

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Your Excel Days

How many days has it been since you started using Excel?

Did you get started in the last century, or more recently?

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Happy Excel Day 44000

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Happy Excel Day 44000

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