Has anyone tried to append data from an Excel 5.0 file into a VFP table that contains date fields. I believe that I am hitting a problem related to the storage of Excel date fields. Excel stores dates in a format called Serial Date. Serial date is a numeric representation of a day from some starting point. For example, today 06/06/97 would be 36577. So, my solution was to store the Excel date fields as a text (character) format. Then, convert it (the Excel character date fields) through code in VFP before loading it into the final table.

I even tried to fool Excel 5.0 by creating a custom format of 'mm/dd/yyyy. It still thinks of it as a date and stores the value as a serial number. But, if I use Excel 95; the custom format seems to work. My client only has Excel 5.0, for now... Are there any converters for VFP that deal with Serial dates? Any comments are appreciated... tia Steve