There are a number of date systems used around the world. The most-widely used is called the Gregorian calendar, with the BC and AD date system familiar to many people. There is another calendar system used by many people around the world called the Buddhist calendar. This calendar system begins its reckoning based on the birth of Buddha. Since this religious leader was born in 543 BC (or Jesus was born 543 years after Buddha, depending on how you look at it), you can convert from one system to another simply by making the proper adjustment to the year.
In other words, the year 2002 in the Gregorian system is expressed as 2545 in the Buddhist system. Likewise, the year 2500 in the Buddhist system would be 1957 in the Gregorian system. Thus, suppose you have the Buddhist date 430611, where 43 is the year (2543), 06 is the month, and 11 is the day of the month. You can convert this to a Gregorian equivalent by simply adding 1957 to the year, in this manner, assuming the Buddhist date is in cell A8:
=DATE(MID(A8,1,2)+1957,MID(A8,3,2),MID(A8,5,2))
The formula essentially pulls the characters of the Buddhist date apart, adds 1957 to the year, and uses the DATE function to put the pieces back together into the Gregorian system.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2049) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.
Professional Development Guidance! Four world-class developers offer start-to-finish guidance for building powerful, robust, and secure applications with Excel. The authors show how to consistently make the right design decisions and make the most of Excel's powerful features. Check out Professional Excel Development today!
Excel can easily store dates. If you want to increment a date by one month, there are a number of ways you can accomplish ...
Discover MoreGiven a starting date and an ending date, you may want to generate the names of all the months between those two dates. ...
Discover MoreHow do you display a number of years, such as 3.67 years, as a number of years and months? It's simple to do with a ...
Discover MoreFREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."
2015-05-25 07:59:07
Noonie
Very informative! Many thanks for your time and effort on explaining all this. It's very helpful. Btw, there's one misunderstanding here about the beginning of the Buddhist calendar. Actually, it began right after Lord Buddha passed away NOT his birth. He died at the age of 80. So Jesus was born 623 years after Buddha. Anyway, again, this is so helpful. It makes my life a lot easier since I live in a country where they use Buddhist calendar. Now I know another way out of fussy. Thanks to you, sir.
Got a version of Excel that uses the menu interface (Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, or Excel 2003)? This site is for you! If you use a later version of Excel, visit our ExcelTips site focusing on the ribbon interface.
FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."
Copyright © 2020 Sharon Parq Associates, Inc.
Comments