DATEVALUE will convert a string to a conventional date. You could do a find and replace operation on your query marks, but that would then obscure the uncertainty, which you may wish to highlight. So, you might come up with a big formula to do it all for you, like this: =DATEDIF(DATEVALUE(IF(RIGHT(A1,1)="?",1,RIGHT(A1,2)) & "/" & IF(MID(A1,6,1)="?","January",MID(A1,6,2)) & "/" & IF(LEFT(A1,1)="?",1950,LEFT(A1,4))),TODAY(),"y") Ray ------------------------------------ GR Business Process Solutions Ray Blake Head of Software Design ray@xxxxxxxxx Braedon Newell Road Hemel Hempstead Herts HP3 9PD tel: 01442 396518 fax: 01442 389353 www.grbps.com ------------------------------------ -----Original Message----- From: mso-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:mso-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Robert Carneal Sent: 20 July 2004 21:55 To: mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [mso] Re: Custom Date difference ---COPY--- I assume Robert is using Excel, since most of his recent questions have been about Excel. ---End--- You are correct, I am using Excel. It took me all of 30 seconds to fall in love with DATEDIF. I wish I had known about this earlier. Thank you! A query for you please. Suppose E1 is text, and contains 1922-10-10 as a person's birthdate. The death date is also text. Is there an easy way to convert that to a "real" date? LOL, I spent NINE hours trying to get Datedif to work, only to discover the numbers were not even date format! I do see a problem with the dates which explains why the original person made it text. The original person used the question mark symbol to denote unknown. 1905-??-17 for example, means the month is unknown. Am I going to need to do something about the question marks one at a time? Thank you. Robert ************************************************************* You are receiving this mail because you subscribed to mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx or MicrosoftOffice@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To send mail to the group, simply address it to mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx To Unsubscribe from this group, send an email to mso-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word "unsubscribe" (without the quotes) in the subject line. Or, visit the group's homepage and use the dropdown menu. This will also allow you to change your email settings to digest or vacation (no mail). //www.freelists.org/webpage/mso To be able to use the files section for sharing files with the group, send a request to mso-moderators@xxxxxxxxxxxxx and you will be sent an invitation with instructions. Once you are a member of the files group, you can go here to upload/download files: http://www.smartgroups.com/vault/msofiles *************************************************************