MS Excel stupidity

In Excel 2003 the date handler starts at January 1, 1900. Dates prior to 1900 cannot be sorted or arithmetically manipulated. Found this trying to build a spreadsheet showing birthdays of my grandparents, and computing how much older/younger they were than each other. Major WTF - the end date is the year 9999. One would think there is far more call to manipulate dates in the past than several millenniums into the future.

Yes, there are work-arounds, but they are ugly and defeat the purpose of a spreadsheet's date function.