A date as text takes at most two digits for month and day

FN-VALUE-002: A date as text takes at most two digits for month and day

Quirk · measured · recorded 2026-11-04

In a three-part numeric date, leading zeros are not free. VALUE("2024/02/01") is 45323, but VALUE("2024/02/001") and VALUE("2024/002/01") are #VALUE!, and so is any month or day of three or more digits in the 45 forms read. A year of one, two or four digits is read: "1/2/1" and "1/02/01" are 2001-02-01, "24/2/1" is 2024-02-01, while "0001/2/1" is #VALUE!. Month 0 and day 0 give #VALUE!. The same limit holds with hyphens: "2024-02-001" through VALUE, and "2024-002-01" and "2024-02-001" through DATEVALUE, are #VALUE!. The settings of this run are en-ZA: decimal point, space as thousands separator, year-month-day date order.

Basis: 45 recorded VALUE readings covering year, month and day tokens of one to five digits, and 2 DATEVALUE readings.

Open: Three-digit years were not read.

Open: Other date orders and locales were not read.