Behind everything there is a number

Behind everything is in Excel there is a secret number which is stored in the background - be it text or date or number. So it's like deception in front of your eyes... :)

1. All Characters

Try this in any worksheet cell -- = code("A") and the result is 65 and when you enter a function = Code ("a") you get result 97. Why?

Because: Every font set has 255 characters. Every character is represented by number. It's called the Unicode character set. It's a character encoding standard developed by the Unicode Consortium. By using more than one byte to represent each character, Unicode enables almost all of the written languages in the world to be represented by using a single character set.) – 255 Characters.

In this 255 character set - there are 32 non-printable characters which represent machine language. 7-bit ASCII code - values 0 through 0- 31 – Non Printable characters.

2. Date and time

They are stored as sequential serial numbers so that they can be used in calculations.

By default, January 1, 1900 is serial number 1, and January 1, 2010 is serial number 40179 because it is 40179 days after January 1, 1900.

Microsoft Excel for the Macintosh uses a different date system as its default.

Numbers to the right of the decimal point in the serial number represent the time; numbers to the left represent the date.

Eg: the serial number 0.5 represents the time 12:00 noon.