In Excel, both dates and times are just numbers.
Let’s take a look.
Let’s look at the dates first.
To illustrate, let’s use a formula to set column C equal to column B.
Now let’s format column C with theGeneral formatso that we can see the numbers without date formatting.
And January 1, 2002 is equal to the number 37,257.
That is, January 1, 2002 is 37,257 days after January 1, 1900.
Dates in the future are handled in the same way.
April 15, 2020 is equal to the number 43,936.
Now let’s look at time.
Noon is .5, and 6 PM is .75three quarters of the way through the day.
Now let’s look at the last table, Date and Time.
We see that dates with times are just a date value added to a time value.
So, noon on January 1, 2002 is equal 37,257 plus .5.
