"How about using:
=TODAY()-"01/01/2009" "
This gives me the day of the year one day out (According to my diary, i think the example i game in the first post was wrong.)
The link posted by govi gave me the answer, but instead of having it refer to the date in another cell i altered it to...
For some stuff I do at work I need to know the day (not date) of the year. eg today the 28th of july is day 210 of the year.
However, I haven't yet found a way to get excel to this for me automatically, and have to check my diary each time I open this particular spreadsheet and manually enter...