How Excel Stores Dates and Times

Internally, Excel stores a date or time as a number. The whole part of the number (the part to the left of the decimal point) represents the number of days since an arbitrary starting point (typically January 1, 1900). The decimal portion (the part to the right of the decimal point) represents the time for that date. These internal representations of dates and times are often referred to as serial numbers.

To see how this works, enter the number 23 in a cell. If you have not previously formatted the cell, Excel uses the General format, displaying the number simply as 23. If you later format this cell using a date format--m/d/yy, for instance--Excel changes the display to 1/23/00, or January 23, 1900.

The portion to the right of the decimal point represents a fractional portion of a day. Thus, a single second would be equal to approximately 0.00001157407, since that is equal to 1 (a day) divided by 86,400 (the number of seconds in a day).

Since Excel stores dates and times as serial numbers, you can do math on them. For instance, if you wanted to determine the number of days between two dates, or the amount of time between two times, simply subtract them from each other. The result is the number of days and fractions of days between the two.