Apple Numbers & Excel - can it yet import excel dates, reliably? Dates convert to numbers! Help please

What versions are you using? The date import is working fine here (Numbers v. 11.0 on the left, Excel for Mac v16.47.1 on the right).

I simply saved the Excel document, closed it, and in went to Numbers File > Open in the menu and navigated to the Excel file.

If for some reason you are ending up with date serial numbers instead of dates then converting from a date serial numbers (that Excel uses) to date-time string (that Numbers and many, many other applications use) is not hard, as you can see in the thread to which you gave the link.

With the date serial number in A1, you get the Numbers date with:

=DATE(1904,1,1)+A1

If this is a frequent problem then there is likely a script solution as well where you could select the cells with date serial numbers in Numbers and click a button to convert them.

SG

If you are having problems with importing Excel dates using the latest version of Numbers then it appears you have answered your own question.

If your dates (numbers) are in one contiguous range of cells, you could use an AppleScript to convert them instead of using formulas in your table. You would select the range of cells, run the script to convert them dates, then set the cell format to display the date as desired. If your dates are in multiple ranges, you would have to do that for each range.

No thanks are in order. I did not confirm the problem. I rarely import Excel files and have never had a problem with importing dates, though I have heard of the problem before. It is interesting that Quicklook gets it right. I don't know how Quicklook does its thing.

I have found that importing/exporting between the two apps rarely gives me a satisfactory result. Usually it is cell formatting, the look of charts, and unsupported functions/features (both directions). The two apps have their own preferred ways of formatting things and doing things it and, while most of it may import/export, working with it in the other app can be painful. It might be fine for viewing the file in the other app or as a first step in transferring the data from one app to the other but if I am going to swap which app I use for a document, the first thing I do after importing is change the formatting of everything using the tools in the new app so as to get rid of any "custom" formatting. And I'll probably remake all charts.

If your desire is to get away from Microsoft, not necessarily go to Numbers, LibreOffice is one of the available free Office clones that is sometimes mentioned here. I assume its import/export is more transparent because it is meant to be a clone. Numbers is not.

Ah, "old' Excel xls files might well be fooling Numbers. Opening them in LibreOffice and resaving as xlsx might well be a good option (I'm not that familiar with LibreOffice.)

I believe the subscription to Microsoft Office (which I got through the Mac App Store) covers all the applications in the suite, both for the Mac and iOS, and of course for Windows. I believe OneDrive space is included with a subscription, but you don't have to use that if you don't want to. You can put your files in iCloud Drive, on Dropbox or elsewhere if you want though I'm guessing you might lose collaboration features that way.

If you are converting to Numbers I would keep in mind that while Numbers can open Excel files and convert them, it rarely does a perfect job because the apps are so different. In many cases you would want want to "reengineer" them to take advantage of special features in Numbers. In Numbers you can easily have multiple tables on a sheet (worksheet in Excel). So you typically won't want to be working with a big expanse of cells, many of them empty, the way you would in Excel. If you haven't already, have a look at the templates at File > New in your menu. You'll find lots of examples how to do things "the Numbers way."

SG