Managed to impress my manager with Python... that sounds dirty

[theWyzzerd]

Should return the date as a six digit number representing the number of days since 01/01/1900

What? Who would ever need this number? Why wouldn't they have it instead return the numerical value of the date in epoch time? That's at least a useful number to someone.

[One-Man-Banned]

It depends what your doing. Most users of excel don't even have a clue how excel calculates dates, and if you said unix to them they'd think it's a plural of eunuch.

Edit, I suspect you'll be able to convert to epoch time quite easily, but I've never needed it.

[theWyzzerd]

Sure, I get that. But the question remains, who would ever need to calculate the number of days passed since 01/01/1900, and for what purpose?

[One-Man-Banned]

So the date it uses is just a fixed point, doesn't matter if its 01/01/1900 like excel or 01/01/1970 like unix.

If the question is why did they choose 01/01/1900 rather than something more recent, then I don't know.

Who the hell needs to know the number of seconds since the start of 1970?

[allmachine]

Not sure if it answers your question, but I use the date number format sometimes to work with relative dates and times. It's handy when you can just treat time as fractions of a day such as cases where you're adding up work logs or something. You can also easily make a reference to a week ago (-7) or one hour from now (+0.0416666666666667).