How To Get Date or Serial Result from DateSerial or DateValue (95510)


The information in this article applies to:

  • Microsoft Visual Basic Standard Edition for Windows 2.0
  • Microsoft Visual Basic Standard Edition for Windows 3.0
  • Microsoft Visual Basic Professional Edition for Windows 2.0
  • Microsoft Visual Basic Professional Edition for Windows 3.0
  • Microsoft Visual Basic Standard Edition for Windows 1.0
This article was previously published under Q95510

SUMMARY

In Visual Basic versions 2.0 and 3.0, the DateSerial and DateValue functions return a variant data type of VarType 7 (Date) instead of a date serial number. The date is still stored internally in the serial number format returned by the DateSerial and DateValue functions in Visual Basic version 1.0 and can be obtained by using the CDbl function in versions 2.0 and 3.0.

This is not a bug. This is a special feature of versions 2.0 and 3.0.

MORE INFORMATION

The return value for DateSerial and DateValue is a formatted date string in the format MM/DD/YY. If you pass it as an argument to the Print Method, Print # and Write # statements are printed as such. The line of code below prints the date as a formatted date string: 
Form1.Print DateSerial(1992,1,1)
To use the underlying serial number, use the Visual Basic CDbl statement to convert the variant return value to a double precision number. This can be useful for storing dates in a random access file because a double precision variable uses eight 8 bytes and a variant uses 16. The line of code below prints the date in serial number format: 
Form1.Print CDbl(DateSerial(1992,1,1))
Modification Type:MinorLast Reviewed:7/1/2004
Keywords:kbhowto KB95510
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