Excel Datedif with dates prior to 1900

Question

How can I calculate the difference between two dates in Excel older than 1900? For example between 05/05/1862 and 04/16/1938. Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Excel stores dates as number of days since 1900, so one option might be to convert them to dates after 1900. For example, if A1 contains the text 05/05/1862 , then this formula results in 05/05/3862 :

= LEFT(A1, 6) & RIGHT(A1, 4) + 2000

and the difference in number of days between two text dates can be:

= (LEFT(A1, 6) & RIGHT(A1, 4) + 2000) - (LEFT(A2, 6) & RIGHT(A2, 4) + 2000)