VBA range.find 发现错误的日期值

Question

I am looking up a price multiplier for a given date in an Excel sheet, but range.find gives the wrong date. Here are the relevant code snippets:

If Not IsWbOpen("daily_prices.xlsx") Then
        Workbooks.Open "C:\.....\daily_prices.xlsx"
    End If
    Set daily = Workbooks("daily_prices.xlsx").Sheets(1)
    daily.Range("A:A").NumberFormat = "dd/mm/yyyy"
End If

This part makes sure that the column A:A, which contains the dates, is formatted correctly. The code then loops through a date range where d is a date between d1 and d2. In my test script, d1= Jan 1, 2023 (formatted as "01/01/2023"), and d2 = Jan 30, 2023 (formatted as "30/01/2023"). The Excel sheet "daily" has a header in row 1 and 49 different dates in column A, ordered chronologically from "11/01/2023" to "01/01/2024", and the related multiplier (k), starting in row 2. Only the dates that have a multiplier defined are present in the sheet. The first group of dates is from "11/01/2023" at row 2 to "22/01/2023" at row 13, the next starts with "17/02/2023" at row 14, and so on. Dates in between have no multiplier, and thus are not present. I search the multiplier with this part of the code:

Set c = daily.Range("A:A").Find(what:=d, After:=Range("A1"), LookIn:=xlValues)    'is this date in the daily prices?
  If Not c Is Nothing Then
     k = CDec(daily.Cells(c.Row, 4))  ' multiplier is in column 4 (D:D)
     rate = rate * k
  End If

As expected, c is NOTHING for all dates below "11/01/2023". When d = "11/01/2023", c becomes "not NOTHING" but strangely it returns "11/11/2023" instead of "11/01/2023", which is in row 40 instead of row 2, thus it fetches the multiplier of row 40 instead of row 2. I have re-checked all the code after reading several similar cases and made sure that column A is formatted correctly as "date", but I still get "11/01/2023" wrongly 'found' at row 40 instead of row 2, and the value returned is "11/11/2023" instead of "11/01/2023". Instead of "12/01/2023", it finds "31/12/2023", and instead of "14/01/2023", which is part of the dataset, it finds nothing. What did I overlook, where is the error?

Answer 1

Eventually, I found the solution. It appears that using dates formatted as dates leads to ambiguity with Range.Find(d) as it's very similar to a text search, and depending what date format you use, their partial strings (month and day) may create confusion in certain language versions of Windows. I noticed this when I was looking for a date with day=11 or 12 and found a date with month=11 or 12. This is typical for the confusion that occurs sometimes when you use data formats like "mm-dd-yyyy" (US) and "dd/mm/yyyy" (other) and looks like a Windows bug to me. Windows should distinguish the two formats clearly, but sometimes it doesn't. There was a similar problem at VBA Range.Find method not finding a value that IS in the range that helped me find the solution. I needed to format the search object temporarily as numbers

daily.Range("A:A").NumberFormat = "0"

and also search for the long integer value of the running date, thus the starting value is

d = CLng(date1)

where d is type number and date1 is type date. The search term is then simply

Set c = daily.Range("A:A").Find(d) 
If Not c Is Nothing Then ...

At the end I reformat the date column with

daily.Range("A:A").NumberFormat = "dd/mm/yyyy;@"

This resolved the problem. Thank you all for your kind help. @Ron Rosenfeld's hint came closest as he proposed to search for What:=CDbl(date) , which is what I am basically doing, except that I prefer CLng over CDbl as I need the date as an integer and not as a floating point number. The only problem with that idea was that you cannot search for.value2. You can only search for xlValues (which is not the same) or xlFormulas. Neither would find this long integer number in the cell's properties.
Transforming both the search object and the search item to numbers resolves the ambiguity completely.