Challenge to get a date correctly formatted...

Question

Hi All,
Does anyone know how to get a formatted date cell to be copied into a formula without losing its formatting ?
for instance cell a1 contains the formatted date: 02 September 2008
I want to use cell a1 into the following formula in cell a2:
="The bill must be payed before "&a1+14&" on account number 1.1.1.1"
So the result should be:
The bill must be payed before 16 September 2008 on account number 1.1.1.1
But what happens is:
The bill must be payed before sept 16, 2008 on account number 1.1.1.1
I've already tried to reapply the formatting by using the inspector, but that didn't solve it..
Can anyone solve this strange behavior ?

Answer 1

SergeRyz wrote:
1) What happens if today is for instance 25th of September, then the day would become 39. So you have to create a very complex formula to take into account the amount of days in the specific month.
On my system at least, Numbers automatically handles this, although if you use an auxiliary cell like in my example, that cell will have a little blue triangle which when clicked will tell you a number was expected between 1 & 31. However, this does not affect the result, nor does the triangle appear in the cell with the formatted result in a sentence.
2) This code will be present on an invoice, so it can't be visible as i have to print it afterwards and sent it to a customer.
I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean. The cell formula should appear only if you set the cell containing it to the text format. And if you want printed output free of any auxiliary cells, either put them in a row or column & choose the "Hide" option for that, or put the cells in another table (possibly on another sheet) & don't print that.
Basically, the idea is to use an auxiliary cell for the future date, concatenate that with whatever text strings you want with the "&" operator in another cell, & set the format of the auxiliary cell to the one you desire. The date format of the cell with the concatenation should track the date format of the auxiliary cell, as long as you don't set its format to text.