Decoding Office Build Numbers
It turns out that the version numbers in Microsoft Office products are more than just simple build numbers.
The 4-digit build number is actually an encoded date which allows you tell when a build was born. The algorithm works like this:
- Take the year in which a project started. For Office “12″, that was 2003.
- Call January of that year “Month 1.”
- The first two digits of the build number are the number of months since “Month 1.”
- The last two digits are the day of that month.
So, if you have build 3417, you would do the following math: “Month 1″ was January 2003. “Month 13″ was January 2004. “Month 25″ was January 2005. Therefore, “Month 34″ would be October 2005.
3417 = October 17, 2005, which was the date on which Office 12 build 3417 started.
- Link (via Coding Horror)
