Question regarding Dates

[LiveUser]

I receive reports weekly and I am creating a receipt log. When I receive the
report I enter the date I received it.

My date has to be setup as d-mmm-yyyy.
I create the year 2008 daily on another worksheet and name it Year2008.

In each cell, C2:BB19, I have a list with every day of the year of 2008,
"Year2008".


I also have conditional formatting referring to cells C1:BB1, Weekly dates.
If the dates from C2:BB19 don't match, then, if early the cell turns yellow,
and if late the cell turns orange.

In the event that within a report, not the day I received the report, but
what is actually in the report gives me a late information, I want to select
a special date, for instance, *d-mmm-yyyy, rather than d-mmm-yyyy. Therefore
I can create another condition where if there is a "*" before the date then
the cell will turn red.

I want to add another 2008 year to my already 2008 year except with someway
of refering to something late in the report i received, like the *.

My problem is, as far as I know, I can't create a date that is recognized as
*d-mmm-yyyy.

This may be as easy as creating another d-mmm-yyyy for 2008 and then
inserting the *. But, I don't know how.

Help?

Thank you.

 

[Tyro]

Dates are numbers to Excel and are expressed as date serial numbers. Excel's
date range is Jan. 1, 1900, day 1, through Dec. 31, 9999, day 2,958,465.
March 13, 2008 is day 39,520. So a cell containing a date actually contains
a number. When you format a number such as 39520 as d-mmm-yyyy, you see
13-Mar-2008 but the cell contains a number. Formatting is for human
consumption. Perhaps this will give you some insight to solving your
problem.

Tyro