Short answer:
There's no way to have a date without a year, it's simply a required part of a date. Just like the second is a required part of the time of day - if you enter, say, "1:15", the actual value will be "01:15:00" (or something like that, depending on your regional settings). The only thing you can do is format the column as text, use a date format that hides the year, or tricks like using formulae to extract the day and month into another column and hiding the column with the actual date.
Explanation:
Excel stores dates as the number of days since 0 (yes, zeroeth) January 1900. So today, 23 August 2012, would be stored as 41144, and 23 August 2008 would be stored as 39683. Because of this, Excel needs to know the year in order to calculate the correct number of days. 23 August on its own is ambiguous, because it could resolve to over 100 different values (one for each year since 1900), that's why Excel adds the year itself if you omit it.
For the time of day, Excel appends a fractional part to the number of days, which represents the fraction of the 24-hour day that has elapsed. For example, 06:00 (or 6 AM) is stored as 0.25, because at that point 25% of the day has passed.
You can see this in action by entering a date and/or time (or just =NOW()
for the current date/time) into a cell in Excel and changing the format to Number. You'll also have to increase the number of decimal places to see the full precision.
For example, the current time (20:19 in my timezone, as of the writing of this) is stored as 41144.846945255.
Exactly this. If having a 2012 in there is really a problem, then the only option is to format the column as text, and forget about using Excel's date formatting capabilities. Of course, that means also forgetting about sending birthday cards on the appropriate day... – Martha – 2012-08-23T17:26:37.860
Thanks for the explanation! I really appreciate being able to understand the principle behind the solution. – Brendan – 2012-08-23T17:28:38.777
So glad I learned about the numbers...I just tried to map this to an XML and it converted all of the dates to numbers and it didn't faze me! – Brendan – 2012-08-24T17:09:28.397
1If you don't want to put 2012, I would rather suggest you to keep date format, but put 1900. Date format is good in case calculation is needed in the future. – wilson – 2012-08-28T07:08:08.187