How to convert a python datetime.datetime to excel serial date number

Question

I need to convert dates into Excel serial numbers for a data munging script I am writing. By playing with dates in my OpenOffice Calc workbook, I was able to deduce that \'1

Answer 1

According to @akgood's answer, when the datetime is before 1/0/1900, the return value is wrong, the corrected return expression may be:

def excel_date(date1):
    temp = dt.datetime(1899, 12, 30)    # Note, not 31st Dec but 30th!
    delta = date1 - temp
    return float(delta.days) + (-1.0 if delta.days < 0 else 1.0)*(delta.seconds)) / 86400