Excel stores a date internally as a number of days since January 1, 1900.
For example: “June 9th, 2011 10:30 AM” would be stored as “40703.4375”.
40703 is the number of full days since 01/01/1900 and 0.4375 represents the time (10.5/24 = 0.4375).
When you process dates read from an Excel spreadsheet (e.g. using PHPExcel) you often want to convert them into a UNIX timestamp i.e. a number of seconds elapsed since midnight of January 1, 1970 UTC.