This is an update to my November 21, 2022 post.
Unfortunately, after several unsuccessful tries, I discovered that the function MAX (and any other function) does not work in Excel for dates before 1900. In summary, Excel reads dates as numbers, and it is created to read dates between 1900 and 9999. It's so incredibly useful to have 9999 and not 1899 (sarcasm). The program does not work well for analyzing historical dates written in the format "mmm dd, yyyy" and ANY other format with a year value of less than 1900. According to several blogs, there is a way around it: Transforming the year by adding 1000 (or 2000 according to others for some issue regarding leap years that I refuse to try to understand). In this way, 1876 becomes 2876 or 3876. Now, for my specific purpose (finding the more recent days among a series and automatically pasting it in a specific cell) this is too much of a complication.
So, now, not only I did not save any time in building my database but I even lost 5 hours trying to figure out it was not possible. Nevertheless, it was worth trying.
In the past, I used historical data in my databases (the 900 members of the labor union in Galveston, and the 5,000 deserters among Connecticut Union soldiers), but at that time I was using Numbers (Mac spreadsheet) instead of Excel. I wonder if I should use Numbers and then save the database as an Excel file. I will make some tests over the Thanksgiving break.
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