Help with excel sheet copy question please

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Recent convert here.

When I am need to copy a excel sheet to a new workbook, the date in the sheet that I am copying to new book does not stay the same. For example, I am copying a sheet with date 1/8/2010 in a cell. On the new sheet that is copied to a new workbook, that date changes to 1/9/2014. All of the other data on sheet stays the same but all the dates on the page change. Other dates at the bottom of the page advance to 1/8/2013.

If I perform this on a PC, all of the dates remain the same. I just talked to another recent convert and he has the same problem.

I am going nuts trying to figure this one out.
Any ideas???
 
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2.1GHz MacBook with 4GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.6, iLife and iWork ‘09
Excel stores dates internally as the number of days since a base date. The problem for you is that the base date is different between the Windows and Mac versions of Excel: on Windows, the base date is January 1, 1900, while on Macs it's January 2, 1904. So what's happening is that the same number of days is being counted, but it's being added to a different date. You can read more about it in Excel's documentation for the DATE function.

To fix it (on a per-workbook basis), choose Excel > Preferences from the menu bar and then click the Calculation section. Uncheck the Use the 1904 date system option and you should be good to go; just keep it in mind when using dates and transferring files between Windows and Mac users.
 

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