Convert Igor date into Excel

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Wed, 06/29/2011 - 06:44 am

Hi all,

This is my first post on this forum, and I am also fairly new with Igor, so my questions may look trivial.
I have an Igor file with a time serie of random data. I need to plot them on Excel, but both softwares seem to handle dates differently (for example: 06/01/2011 8:49:11 gives 3389770151 in Igor and 40695,3674884259 in Excel). However, the ratio of those 2 numbers are constant (fairly the same, but not constant).
Is there a simple way to convert Igor dates to Excel dates?

Thanks for your help
I'm not all that familiar with date/time operations, but a quick perusal of the relevant help docs shows that Igor date representation is based on seconds since midnight 1/1/1904 and excel for windows is based on days since 1/1/1900. You can change excel's default to days since 1/1/1904, but it is still base on days, with fractions of a day (obviously, I guess) represented by the fractional part of that value. Also, apparently excel for the Mac is, by default, based on days since 1/1/1904.

My simplistic approach was to set excel's default to 1904 system, divide Igor's value for 06/01/2011 8:49:11 by 86400 (secs/day) in excel and change the cell format to date/time. The result reported in excel is 6/1/2011 10:49:11. Note that is 10:49:11 not 8:49:11 as you reported. Don't know why.

This is a quick & dirty approach. Maybe it will serve as a starting point for you and maybe, most likely, someone will have a significantly more elegant approach.

PS The Igor value for 6/1/2011 8:49:11 AM should be 3389762951.

June 29, 2011 at 10:18 am - Permalink

For some relevant information, execute:
DisplayHelpTopic "Excel Date/Time Versus Igor Date/Time"

June 29, 2011 at 01:28 pm - Permalink