I'm successfully importing tables and views from MySQL into Excel via ODBC,
except dates before 1900 and incomplete dates of any period. It's historical
data about the convicts with dates ranging from the 1700s to the mid 1900s.

Excel's query window shows the dates in the right format - eg. 1832-11-19,
or 1917-00-00, or blank for Null, but the cells in Excel don't accept them.
Nulls appear as empty cells - that's ok. Any date with a "00" for month or
day also appear as a blank cell - that's not ok. Complete dates before 1900
appear as "0/01/1900" - that's not ok. Complete dates after 1900 appear in
their correct date format as set by Excel.

I know that Excel can't handle dates before 1900 or incomplete dates. Does
anyone know a work-around so the pre-1900 and incomplete dates can appear as
text strings in the format "yyyy-mm-dd".

One workaround I found is to copy a table or results of a query or view in
Navicat and paste into Excel. That's not completely satisfactory. I have the
same problem with ODBC and Access where I want the latest versions of the
data without having to know what's been changed in MySQL. Using Navicat's
expert to Excel has the same problem.

MySQL vs. 5.0.20-nt
ODBC vs. 3-51-14
Excel vs.2002


Gary Luke
Sydney, Australia