Lab 01
Anyone working close to IT sooner or later runs into date representations that are hard to read: unix timestamps, made of a flood of digits, or Excel serials, which look like compressed dates.
The work we have been doing for years in banking and finance often puts these non-human-readable formats in front of us, so we built a tool to get back to readable values quickly, and the other way around.
Technical note: serials follow Excel’s 1900 system (1 = January 1, 1900), bug included. Lotus 1-2-3 treated 1900 as a leap year, Excel copied the behaviour for file compatibility and never went back. Old Excel for Mac used a 1904 system instead: if your numbers look four years off, that’s the one.
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