RE: [office-formula] Conflict between Part 1 and Part 2

[Eric Patterson <ericpa@exchange.microsoft.com>]

On Saturday, February 06, 2010 2:05 PM, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote,

>> 4) To be consistent with part 1, the "shall" requirement for support in
>> part 2 should be amended to say dates from 1899-12-31 through 9999-12-31
>> shall be supported.
>
>Which of course forces applications with a null-date of later than
>1899-12-31 to support negative dates. I have no problem with that but we
>should be aware of that implication.

I don't believe this is the case.  The null-date indicates that the time 24:00 on the date specified is equal to the serial number value of zero.  We can require that a null-date of 1899-12-31 be supported without the actual date 1899-12-31 being supported as an input value in a spreadsheet and without the support for negative dates.

-Eric