Lab 03
If you work anywhere close to IT, you’ve almost certainly run into some very strange ways of representing dates: the ones made of a flood of digits (unix timestamps) or the ones that look compressed (Excel serials).
The kind of work I do (banks and financial companies) has often put these non-human-readable formats in front of me, so I thought I’d build myself a lab to get back to readable values quickly, and the other way around.
A note for the meticulous: serials follow Excel’s 1900 system (1 = January 1, 1900), bug included. Lotus 1-2-3 treated 1900 as a leap year, Excel copied it for file compatibility and never went back. Old Excel for Mac used a 1904 system instead: if your numbers look four years off, that’s the one.