OLE Automation Date

TIL about the [Excel serial date number](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/date-systems-in-excel-e7fe7167-48a9-4b96-bb53-5612a800b487) format. #

They’re also known as an OLE Automation date - which, I assume, is how mechanical bulls track their calendars. #

The date is present in the format 45911.32361 where #

  1. The integer part 45911 represents the number of days since the epoch date.
  2. The decimal part .32361 represents the fraction of a day, ie the time of day

I had a zap populate a google sheet with “current time”. The formatting helper in Zapier shows the current time in a specific format but either #

  1. google sheets automatically converted it to the excel format (for some reason?!) when it saw the date from Zapier OR
  2. The web hook from squarespace is hooking into a db/csv/something that is optimised for excel, as opposed to coming from the form directly (which makes sense).