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Quick questions with Google Sheets.

I'm trying to extract the year from a date using the YEAR() function.
In the first column, I formatted all cells as dates, but in the second column, when I use =YEAR() and reference the first column I get really unexpected results.

Says we're all the way back to 1905

Any ideas?

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The reason is that column is also formatted as a date. Format it as a number and you'll get what you're after.

Google Sheets stores dates as a number of days from 12/31/1899. Your YEAR() is appropriately pulling out "2010" (for example) but is then converting it to a date. 2010 days after 12/31/1899 is 7/2/1905. (The big clue is that the two sample rows you show are seven years apart in the first column, then 7 days apart in the second column.)

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