extract serial number of a date from a textbox input

Sorry, I'm not even sure if I am using the right term. But other people from other forums are calling it as such so I thought,,,, you know.

Anyway, say A1 has a date, 3/31/2013. And in B1, we put =VALUE(A1), which will give us the serial number of the date as 41364. Again I don't know the correct term for that. LOL. This also appears if instead of Date, a cell is formatted as Text instead with date in it.

I'm trying to figure out how to extract that numerical value (serial number in my world) and use it to the above expression.

I tried Dim xdate as string also, but it returned xdate = "" in debug.

I'm desperate,