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Date Delimiters

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When you work with date literals in your code, you must indicate to Microsoft® Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA) that a value is a date. If you do not, VBA might think you are performing subtraction or floating-point division.

For example, if you run the following fragment, the value that VBA assigns to the Date variable is not April 5, 1998, but 4 divided by 5 divided by 98. Because you are assigning it to a Date variable, VBA converts the number to a date, and prints "12:11:45 AM" to the Immediate window:

Dim dteDate As Date
dteDate = 4 / 5 / 98
Debug.Print dteDate

To avoid this problem, you must include delimiters around the date. The preferred date delimiter for VBA is the number sign (#). In addition, you can use double quotation marks, as you would for a string, but doing so requires VBA to perform an extra step to convert the string to a date. If you rewrite the fragment as follows to include the date delimiter, VBA prints "4/5/98" to the Immediate window:

Dim dteDate As Date
dteDate = #4/5/98#
Debug.Print dteDate

See Also

Working with Dates and Times | The Date Data Type | Getting the Current Date and Time | Formatting a Date | Assembling a Date | Getting Part of a Date | Adding and Subtracting Dates | Calculating Elapsed Time