1900 and 1904 Date Formatting

Excel and some database systems are capable of using both 1900 and 1904 date systems. In the 1900 date system, which Excel uses by default, the earliest possible date is January 1, 1900. In the 1904 system the earliest possible date is January 1, 1904. The latter system was devised to deal with problems caused by the fact that 1900 is not a leap year.

Anyone who has used Excel fairly often will realize that a date can be converted to a number. So if we enter 7/4/1976 in a cell and the just past the text of this entry in an adjacent cell, we get the number 27945.

In Excel 2016, if you create a new workbook and then go to File . . . Options . . .Advanced, and scroll down to the 'When calculating this workbook' you'll see the option 'Use 1904 date system'.

If you check off this option and then enter 7/4/1976 in the new workbook and copy the text only to an adjacent cells, you get the number 26483.

The difference between these two numbers and any two dates entered with the two systems is 1462. This is something to keep in mind as dates may get converted to numeric form when text is exported from spreadsheets and other systems. If you're finding that the dates in metadata for documents are inaccurate consider this possible source of the problem.

Converting an HTML Table to Excel

Sometimes you may wish to copy a table on a web page and it put into an Excel spreadsheet. If you simply copy the table from the web page and paste it into Excel, you'll likely end up with merged cells that will misalign the data from adjoining columns. If you just paste only the text of the HTML table, you'll end up with a single column of text that can't be parsed back into tabular form very easily.

Try using the conversion tool available on this site: http://www.convertcsv.com/html-table-to-csv.htm. The tool gives you the option of either uploading an html file; entering a web page's address, or pasting in HTML code. In this example we start with a web page from the kCura site which has a lot of text, but concludes with a table at the bottom.

When I enter the web address, https://platform.kcura.com/9.3/Content/Building_Relativity_applications/Creating_an_application_in_Relativity.htm the HTML code of the web page gets copied to the box below. As you can see Step 2 of the tool gives you the choose of picking different delimiters for a .csv file.

Finally in Step 3 a preview of how the data will look in Excel is shown and you're given the option to export to a .xlsx or .csv file. A web page may contain more than one table of course, and the drop down menu gives you the chance to select the table you need.

When the exported data is opened in Excel you'll see that you have everything nicely separated in the same number of rows and columns as the HTML table, but that the conversion tool doesn't do a very good job of accounting for line breaks inside cells. In order to account for these use the Excel SUBSTITUTE formula, =SUBSTITUTE(B2," ",CHAR(10)) to switch long whitespaces between lines with a line break.

Macro to List Linked Excel Files

Use the below macro when you want to get a list of source files linked to an Excel file that you're using. It was posted to the Extend Office site, by the developers of Kutools. When you try to open an Excel file that has links in formulas to other Excel files which are no longer in the same location as when the file was created, you'll get a message like this:

This is a common problem in electronic discovery. Excel files will be produced in native format and then end up being used by someone working on a different network that does not have other Excel native files in the same location. If you can't find these files in the production database, you may need to make a list of them so you can request them from the other side. The macro features in tonight's post will create a new worksheet in your Excel file listing all of the source spreadsheets and their file paths.

Sub ListLinks() 'Updateby20140529 Dim wb As Workbook Set wb = Application.ActiveWorkbook If Not IsEmpty(wb.LinkSources(xlExcelLinks)) Then wb.Sheets.Add xIndex = 1 For Each link In wb.LinkSources(xlExcelLinks) Application.ActiveSheet.Cells(xIndex, 1).Value = link xIndex = xIndex + 1 Next link End If End Sub

[try copying the VB code of the Extend Office site, if copying & pasting in this code doesn't work.]