by The tutorial explains how to use Excel functions to convert text to date and number to date, and how to turn text strings into dates in a non-formula way. You will also learn how to quickly change a number to date format.
Since Excel is not the only application you work with, sometimes you'll find yourself working with dates imported in an Excel worksheet from a .csv file or another external source. When that happens, chances are the dates will export as text entries. Even though they look like dates, Excel won't not recognize them as such.
There are many ways to convert text to date in Excel and this tutorial aims to cover them all, so that you can choose a text-to-date conversion technique most suitable for your data format and your preference for a formula or non-formula way.
How to distinguish normal Excel dates from "text dates"
When importing data into Excel, there is often a problem with date formatting. The imported entries may look like normal Excel dates to you, but they don't behave like dates. Microsoft Excel treats such entries as text, meaning you cannot sort your table by date properly, nor can you use those "text dates" in formulas, PivotTables, charts or any other Excel tool that recognizes dates.
There are a few signs that can help you determine whether a given entry is a date or a text value.
| Dates | Text values |
|
|
How to convert number to date in Excel
Since all Excel functions that change text to date return a number as a result, let's have a closer look at converting numbers to dates first.
As you probably know, Excel stores dates and times as serial numbers and it is only a cell's formatting that forces a number to be displayed as a date. For example, 1-Jan-1900 is stored as number 1, 2-Jan-1900 is stored as 2, and 1-Jan-2015 is stored as 42005. For more information on how Excel stores dates and times, please see Excel date format.
When calculating dates in Excel, the result returned by different date functions is often a serial number representing a date. For example, if =TODAY()+7 returns a number like 44286 instead of the date that is 7 days after today, that does not mean the formula is wrong. Simply, the cell format is set to General or Text while it should be Date.
To convert such serial number to date, all you have to do is change the cell number format. For this, simply pick Date in the Number Format box on the Home tab.
To apply a format other than default, then select the cells with serial numbers and press Ctrl+1 to open the Format Cells dialog. On the Number tab, choose Date, select the desired date format under Type and click OK.
Yep, it's that easy! If you want something more sophisticated than predefined Excel date formats, please see how to create a custom date format in Excel.
If some stubborn number refuses to change to a date, check out Excel date format not working - troubleshooting tips.
How to convert 8-digit number to date in Excel
It's a very common situation when a date is input as an 8-digit number like 10032016, and you need to convert it into a date value that Excel can recognize (10/03/2016). In this case, simply changing the cell format to Date won't work - you will get ########## as the result.
To convert such a number to date, you will have to use the DATE function in combination with RIGHT, LEFT and MID functions. Unfortunately, it is not possible to make a universal formula that will work in all scenarios because the original number can be input in a variety of different formats. For example:
| Number | Format | Date |
| 10032016 | ddmmyyyy | 10-Mar-2016 |
| 20160310 | yyyymmdd | |
| 20161003 | yyyyddmm |
Anyway, I will try to explain the general approach to converting such numbers to dates and provide a few formula examples.
For starters, remember the order of the Excel Date function arguments:
So, what you need to do is extract a year, month and date from the original number and supply them as the corresponding arguments to the Date function.
For example, let's see how you can convert number 10032016 (stored in cell A1) to date 3/10/2016.
- Extract the year. It's the last 4 digits, so we use the RIGHT function to pick the last 4 characters: RIGHT(A1, 4).
- Extract the month. It's the 3rd and 4th digits, so we employ the MID function to get them MID(A1, 3, 2). Where 3 (second argument) is the start number, and 2 (third argument) is the number of characters to extract.
- Extract the day. It's the first 2 digits, so we have the LEFT function to return the first 2 characters: LEFT(A2,2).
Finally, embed the above ingredients into the Date function, and you get a formula to convert number to date in Excel:
=DATE(RIGHT(A1,4), MID(A1,3,2), LEFT(A1,2))
The following screenshot demonstrates this and a couple more formulas in action:
Please pay attention to the last formula in the above screenshot (row 6). The original number-date (161003) contains only 2 chars representing a year (16). So, to get the year of 2016, we concatenate 20 and 16 using the following formula: 20&LEFT(A6,2). If you don't do this, the Date function will return 1916 by default, which is a bit weird as if Microsoft still lived in the 20th century :)
Note. The formulas demonstrated in this example work correctly as long as all numbers you want to convert to dates follow the same pattern.
How to convert text to date in Excel
When you spot text dates in your Excel file, most likely you would want to convert those text strings to normal Excel dates so that you can refer to them in your formulas to perform various calculations. And as is often the case in Excel, there are a few ways to tackle the task.
Excel DATEVALUE function - change text to date
The DATEVALUE function in Excel converts a date in the text format to a serial number that Excel recognizes as a date.
The syntax of Excel's DATEVALUE is very straightforward:
So, the formula to convert a text value to date is as simple as =DATEVALUE(A1), where A1 is a cell with a date stored as a text string.
Because the Excel DATEVALUE function converts a text date to a serial number, you will have to make that number look like a date by applying the Date format to it, as we discussed a moment ago.
The following screenshots demonstrates a few Excel DATEVALUE formulas in action:
Excel DATEVALUE function - things to remember
When converting a text string to a date using the DATEVALUE function, please keep in mind that:
- Time information in text strings is ignored, as you can see in rows 6 and 8 above. To convert text values containing both dates and times, use the VALUE function.
- If the year is omitted in a text date, Excel's DATEVALUE will pick the current year from your computer's system clock, as demonstrated in row 4 above.
- Since Microsoft Excel stores dates since January 1, 1900 , the use of the Excel DATEVALUE function on earlier dates will result in the #VALUE! error.
- The DATEVALUE function cannot convert a numeric value to date, nor can it process a text string that looks like a number, for that you will need to use the Excel VALUE function, and this is exactly what we are going to discuss next.
Excel VALUE function - convert a text string to date
Compared to DATEVALUE, the Excel VALUE function is more versatile. It can convert any text string that looks like a date or number into a number, which you can easily change to a date format of your choosing.
The syntax of the VALUE function is as follows:
Where text is a text string or reference to a cell containing the text you want to convert to number.
The Excel VALUE function can process both date and time, the latter is converted to a decimal portion, as you can see in row 6 in the following screenshot:
Mathematical operations to convert text to dates
Apart from using specific Excel functions such as VALUE and DATEVALUE, you can perform a simple mathematical operation to force Excel to do a text-to-date conversion for you. The required condition is that an operation should not change the date's value (serial number). Sounds a bit tricky? The following examples will make things easy!
Assuming that your text date is in cell A1, you can use any of the following formulas, and then apply the Date format to the cell:
- Addition:
=A1 + 0 - Multiplication:
=A1 * 1 - Division:
=A1 / 1 - Double negation:
=--A1
As you can see in the above screenshot, mathematical operations can convert dates (rows 2 and 4), times (row 6) as well as numbers formatted as text (row 8). Sometimes the result is even displayed as a date automatically, and you don't have to bother about changing the cell format.
How to convert text strings with custom delimiters to dates
If your text dates contain some delimiter other than a forward slash (/) or dash (-), Excel functions won't be able to recognize them as dates and return the #VALUE! error.
To fix this, you can run Excel's Find and Replace tool to replace your delimiter with a slash (/), all in one go:
- Select all the text strings you want to convert to dates.
- Press Ctrl+H to open the Find and Replace dialog box.
- Enter your custom separator (a dot in this example) in the Find what field, and a slash in the Replace with
- Click the Replace All
Now, the DATEVALUE or VALUE function should have no problem with converting the text strings to dates. In the same manner, you can fix dates containing any other delimiter, e.g. a space or a backward slash.
If you prefer a formula solution, you can use Excel's SUBSTITUTE function instead of Replace All to switch your delimiters to slashes.
Assuming the text strings are in column A, a SUBSTITUTE formula may look as follows:
=SUBSTITUTE(A1, ".", "/")
Where A1 is a text date and "." is the delimiter your strings are separated with.
Now, let's embed this SUBSTITUTE function into the VALUE formula:
=VALUE(SUBSTITUTE(A1, ".", "/"))
And have the text strings converted to dates, all with a single formula.
As you see, the Excel DATEVALUE and VALUE functions are quite powerful, but both have their limits. For example, if you are trying to convert complex text strings like Thursday, January 01, 2015, neither function could help. Luckily, there is a non-formula solution that can handle this task and the next section explains the detailed steps.
Text to Columns wizard - formula-free way to covert text to date
If you are a non-formula user type, a long-standing Excel feature called Text To Columns will come in handy. It can cope with simple text dates demonstrated in Example 1 as well as multi-part text strings shown in Example 2.
Example 1. Converting simple text strings to dates
If the text strings you want to convert to dates look like any of the following:
- 1.1.2015
- 1.2015
- 01 01 2015
- 2015/1/1
You don't really need formulas, nor exporting or importing anything. All it takes is 5 quick steps.
In this example, we will be converting text strings like 01 01 2015 (day, month and year are separated with spaces) to dates.
- In your Excel worksheet, select a column of text entries you want to convert to dates.
- Switch to the Data tab, Data Tools group, and click Text to Columns.
- In step 1 of the Convert Text to Columns Wizard, select Delimited and click Next.
- In step 2 of the wizard, uncheck all delimiter boxes and click Next.
- In the final step, select Date under Column data format, choose the format corresponding to your dates, and click Finish.
In this example, we are converting the text dates formatted as "01 02 2015" (month day year), so we select MDY from the drop down box.
Now, Excel recognizes your text strings as dates, automatically converts them to your default date format and displays right-aligned in the cells. You can change the date format in the usual way via the Format Cells dialog.
Note. For the Text to Column wizard to work correctly, all of your text strings should be formatted identically. For example, if some of your entries are formatted like day/month/year format while others are month/day/year, you would get incorrect results.
Example 2. Converting complex text strings to dates
If your dates are represented by multi-part text strings, such as:
- Thursday, January 01, 2015
- January 01, 2015 3 PM
You will have to put a bit more effort and use both the Text to Columns wizard and Excel DATE function.
- Select all text strings to be converted to dates.
- Click the Text to Columns button on the Data tab, Data Tools group.
- On step 1 of the Convert Text to Columns Wizard, select Delimited and click Next.
- On step 2 of the wizard, select the delimiters your text strings contain.
For example, if you are converting strings separated by commas and spaces, like "Thursday, January 01, 2015", you should choose both delimiters - Comma and Space.
It also makes sense to select the "Treat consecutive delimiters as one" option to ignore extra spaces, if your data has any.
And finally, have a look at the Data preview window and verify if the text strings are split to columns correctly, then click Next.
- On step 3 of the wizard, make sure all columns in the Data Preview section have the General format. If they don't, click on a column and select General under the Column data format options.
Note. Do not choose the Date format for any column because each column contains only one component, so Excel won't be able to understand this is a date.
If you don't need some column, click on it and select Do not import column (skip).
If you don't want to overwrite the original data, specify where the columns should be inserted - enter the address for the top left cell in the Destination field.
When done, click the Finish button.
As you see in the screenshot above, we are skipping the first column with the days of the week, splitting the other data into 3 columns (in the General format) and inserting these columns beginning from cell C2.
The following screenshot shows the result, with the original data in column A and the split data in columns C, D and E.
- Finally, you have to combine the date parts together by using a DATE formula. The syntax of the Excel DATE function is self-explanatory:
DATE(year, month, day)
In our case,
yearis in column E anddayis in column D, no problem with these.It's not so easy with
monthbecause it is text while the DATE function needs a number. Luckily, Microsoft Excel provides a special MONTH function that can change a month's name to a month's number:=MONTH(serial_number)For the MONTH function to understand it deals with a date, we put it like this:
=MONTH(1&C2)Where C2 contains the name of the month, January in our case. "1&" is added to concatenate a date (1 January) so that the MONTH function can convert it to the corresponding month number.
And now, let's embed the MONTH function into the
month; argument of our DATE formula:=DATE(F2,MONTH(1&D2),E2)
And voila, our complex text strings are successfully converted to dates:
Quick conversion of text dates using Paste Special
To quickly convert a range of simple text strings to dates, you can use the following trick.
- Copy any empty cell (select it and press Ctrl + C).
- Select the range with text values you want to convert to dates.
- Right-click the selection, click Paste Special, and select Add in the Paste Special dialog box:
- Click OK to complete the conversion and close the dialog.
What you have just done is tell Excel to add a zero (empty cell) to your text dates. To be able to do this, Excel converts a text string to a number, and since adding a zero does not change the value, you get exactly what you wanted - the date's serial number. As usual, you change a number to the date format by using the Format Cells dialog.
To learn more about the Paste Special feature, please see How to use Paste Special in Excel.
Fixing text dates with two-digit years
The modern versions of Microsoft Excel are smart enough to spot some obvious errors in your data, or better say, what Excel considers an error. When this happens, you will see an error indicator (a small green triangle) in the upper-left corner of the cell and when you select the cell, an exclamation mark appears:
Clicking the exclamation mark will display a few options relevant to your data. In case of a 2-digit year, Excel will ask if you want to convert it to 19XX or 20XX.
If you have multiple entries of this type, you can fix them all in one fell swoop - select all the cells with errors, then click on the exclamation mark and select the appropriate option.
How to turn on Error Checking in Excel
Usually, Error Checking is enabled in Excel by default. To make sure, click File > Options > Formulas, scroll down to the Error Checking section and verify if the following options are checked:
- Enable background error checking under Error Checking;
- Cells containing years represented as 2 digits under Error checking rules.
How to change text to date in Excel an easy way
As you see, converting text to date in Excel is far from being a trivial one-click operation. If you are confused by all different use cases and formulas, let me show you a quick and straightforward way.
Install our Ultimate Suite (a free trial version can be downloaded here), switch to the Ablebits Tools tab (2 new tabs containing 70+ awesome tools will be added to your Excel!) and find the Text to Date button:
To convert text-dates to normal dates, here's what you do:
- Select the cells with text strings and click the Text to Date button.
- Specify the date order (days, months and years) in the selected cells.
- Choose whether to include or not include time in the converted dates.
- Click Convert.
That's it! The results of conversion will appear in the adjacent column, your source data will be preserved. If something goes wrong, you can simply delete the results and try again with a different date order.
Tip. If you chose to convert times as well as dates, but the time units are missing in the results, be sure to apply a number format that shows both the date and time values. For more info, please see How to create custom date and time formats.
If you are curious to learn more about this wonderful tool, please check out its home page: Text to Date for Excel.
This is how you convert text to date in Excel and change dates to text. Hopefully, you have been able to find a technique to your liking. In the next article, we will tackle the opposite task and explore different ways of converting Excel dates to text strings. I thank you for reading and hope to see you next week.
723 comments
How to get Monday 12th April 2021 to Friday 16th April 2021
Hello Alexander,
Looks like you've provided great information so far. My question is no doubt simple, but I can't seem to find an answer.
I need to convert 3-character month text ("JAN" ... "DEC") into a 2-digit text month name ("01" ... "12").
Basically all I need is to add a leading zero to months less than 10 (Jan~Sept), but need a formula to work with any month text.
Can you help, please? Thanks so much.
Can Someone help me convert this text to date?
Nov 26, 2020
Hi,
Your question has already been answered in this comment above.
Hi, Good day!
Can you help me to convert day into date, eg. Saturday, 6:30 pm (as shows in outlook email), need to change it as 21-Nov-2020,6 :30 pm in excel.
Also if not possible, kindly help to split day and time into 2 separate columns in excel.
This would help me to find the duration of the task completed.
Thanks dear
Hello!
Saturday, 6:30 pm cannot be converted to a date since there are 52 Saturdays in the year.
Please check out this article to learn how to split text in a cell.
Hello guys.
I have an excel with dates. I have a several dates like: nov/7/2020, then when I convert to dates with dd/mm/yyyy format it works fine but bellow the last date with november, the october's dates start, and those dates like this: oct/1/2020, doesn't work the date conversion via "Text" to Column".
I need help
Bests regards. Thanks a lot.
Hello!
I’m sorry but your task is not entirely clear to me. For me to be able to help you better, please describe your task in more detail. Please specify what you were trying to find, what formula you used and what problem or error occurred. Give an example of the source data and the expected result.
It’ll help me understand it better and find a solution for you. Thank you.
Hi,
Can someone help with following format please? I need change the format for date e.g 21/09/2020, but it comes up as 5 digit number e.g 44095. How to convert this number to date please? thank you
Hello!
You need to set the date format in the cell.
Please have a look at this article
Hi,
Can someone help with following format please? I need change the format for date e.g 21/09/2020, but it comes up as 5 digit number e.g 44095. thank you
Hey,
Could someone help me covert following:
Oct 30, 2020 (as a text from a .cvs file) - > date
Aim will be to sort the dates from oldest to newest at the end (what is not possible at this point)
Many thanks in advance,
Hello!
Please try the following formula to convert text to date:
=DATE(RIGHT(D1,4),MONTH(1&LEFT(D1,3)),MID(D1,5,2))
I hope my advice will help you solve your task.
Hey, what can I do so that if I enter the number 240402 in A1, I get 24/04/02 in the same cell?
Hello!
I hope you have studied the recommendations in the tutorial above. Pay attention to the following paragraph of the article above — How to convert 8-digit number to date
You can change the value in a cell either manually or using the VBA macro
Hai Alex,
Can you help me?
I want to convert "September 30th 2020, 17:00:08.680" to "October 1st 2020, 00:00:08.680", so i want to change to +8 with automatically change the date and time.
Any idea how to do that automatically?
Thank you Alex.
Hello!
Please have a look at this comment.
Add to date 1. If your data is written in cell D1, and the new date is in D3, then you can use the formula
=TEXT(D3,"mmmm d yyyy")&MID(D1,SEARCH(",",D1,1),50)
I hope my advice will help you solve your task.
Thanks a lot.
Hello Alexander,
First of all, great work here helping everybody out! Thanks for that.
My question is a bit different from most. I have dates like this: early Jan 2021, middle Jan 2021 and late Jan 2021 for example.
From this info a new date should appear in the next column.
- Early Jan 2021 > 25-02-2021
- Middle Jan 2021 > 05-03-2021
- Late Jan 2021 > 15-03-2021
I can turn Early Jan 2021 into dates by using the replace function to turn the word Early into 05.
My question is how do I go from 05 Jan 2021 in one cell to 25-02-2021 in another?
I hope I made myself clear.
Thanks again!
Hello!
If I understand your task correctly, the following formula should work for you:
=DATEVALUE(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"Early",5,1))+51
I hope this will help, otherwise please do not hesitate to contact me anytime.
I'm sorry, I don't quite understand what's happening in this formula.
What should be in cell A1 in this example? And what would be the output of this formula?
Hi,
In A1, write "Early Jan 2021". You will receive the date 25-02-2020
I think my Excel might be different. The variables for my SUBSTITUTE function are: (text; old_text; new_text; [instance_num])
Ah! If I delete the instance number it works! Thank you so much.
Thank you for your help Alexander and it works, but only for January. If I use February for example it does not return 25-03-2021 but instead 28-03-2021. I guess what I am trying is a bit too complicated.
Also would there be a way to make the formula conditional? So Early would be changed to 5, Middle would be changed to 15 and Late would be changed to 25?
Hello!
I wrote this formula based on the description you provided in your original comment. Please note that if you’d provided me with the precise and detailed description of your task from the very beginning, I’d have created a different formula that would have worked for your case.
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("early",A1,1)), EDATE(DATEVALUE("1 "&MID(A1,FIND(" ",A1,1)+1,50)),1)+24,
IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("middle",A1,1)), EOMONTH(EDATE(DATEVALUE("1 "&MID(A1,FIND(" ",A1,1)+1,50)),1),0)+5,
IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("late",A1,1)), EOMONTH(EDATE(DATEVALUE("1 "&MID(A1,FIND(" ",A1,1)+1,50)),1),0)+15,"")))
I'm having a hard time with this:
C2 has a custom date format of 2020-10-21 and is set using custom formatting built into Excel
D2 has a static general formatted number of lets say 0085001832000
E2 has a digit, lets use 9
F2 has a custom formatted "date" that was added to the custom formatting selection of yymmdd and is pulling from the date from C2 in a yyyy-mm-dd custom format (i.e. 201021).
G2 has a number in a text format of 20200045
My issue is when I try to combine D2, E2, F2 and G2 into H2, everything works out great with the exception of the Date from cell F2. The combined string says 00850018320009"1144124"20200045. I'm not sure what's happening with the area in "" which should be the date information in F2. Anyone have any idea why it's converting it into what appears to be a number that represents the date?
Hello!
Dates are stored in Excel as numbers. If you want to add a date to a text string, then you need to convert the date to text with TEXT function. Read more in this guide.
If there is anything else I can help you with, please let me know.
I managed to convert some dates as MMDDYYYY to MM-YR. However, only half converted. The rest remains as MMDDYYYY. How do I format the balance?
Hello!
Unfortunately, without seeing your data it is difficult to give you any advice. Please provide me with an example of the source data and the expected result. I can assume that some dates are written as text. What does format mean MM-YR ??
It means Month-Year
If you do not explain how I asked, I cannot help you.
In A2 column I have 200 hundreds of dates as a text string, like, how to get all these into MMDDYYYY format? Here I only know with an open eye which one is a year, and the month and days are confusing.
1949/5/2
2-3-2002
09/11/1988
11/12/1987
03/02/1999
02-08-91
Hello!
All of your dates are spelled differently. Therefore, you need to write a formula for each of them. Use the guidelines in this article, as well as the DATE, LEFT, MID, RIGHT functions.
You will find many ways to convert text to date in the comments to this article.
Hello,
I have a transaction date and time as text, 2020092120371600. I need it to display as date and time, including the seconds, in a single cell. Ideally the above would display as 09/21/20 21:37 16:00, where the 16:00 represent seconds. Can this be done such that the column of transactions date/times can be sortable? Thanks in advance for assistance with this.
Hello!
To convert your text to date and time, use the formula
=DATE(LEFT(A1,4),MID(A1,5,2),MID(A1,7,2))+TIME(MID(A1,9,2),MID(A1,11,2),MID(A1,13,2))
Use a custom date and time format too
mm/d/yyyy hh:mm SS:"00"
I hope my advice will help you solve your task.
This worked perfectly! Thank you!
In certain cases, the last 2 digits in my time stamp are not "00". Maybe this is called hundredths of a second? Can Excel also handle this via formatting? Even though the value is very, very small, it does make a difference in my sort-order. An example would be; 2020091712225895
Hello!
Change the formula to show milliseconds
=DATE(LEFT(D1,4),MID(D1,5,2),MID(D1,7,2)) + TIME(MID(D1,9,2),MID(D1,11,2), MID(D1,13,2)) + (1/24)/60/60/1000*RIGHT(D1,2)
Milliseconds are usually 3 digits. If you only use 2 digits then
=DATE(LEFT(D1,4),MID(D1,5,2),MID(D1,7,2)) + TIME(MID(D1,9,2),MID(D1,11,2), MID(D1,13,2)) + (1/24)/60/60/1000*RIGHT(D1,2)*10
Also use another custom date and time format
mm/d/yyyy hh:mm ss.000
Every last decimal and digit looks great? I really am thankful for your time to help with this. I know how you did this, but I struggle writing these. It's like magic when I double-click the cross that populates the column on down. Cheers!
i am very thankful to you if you convert text
Jan 15, 2021 15:33:25
in to 15,1,2021 and 15:33:25
I solved it myself! :3
I hope is useful for someone else.
Sep 7 2020 5:14PM
Sep 11 2020 1:12AM
Sep 18 2020 10:18PM
Mar 3 2020 10:34PM
first column
=date(MID(A2,8,4),MONTH(1&LEFT(A2,3)),MID(A2,5,2))
second column
=TIMEVALUE(MID(A2,13,5)&" "&RIGHT(A2,2))
Regards.
Need to convert the following format into two columns. So it will look like this:
Sep 7 2020 5:14PM 09/07/2020 5:14 PM
Sep 11 2020 1:12AM 09/11/2020 1:12 AM
Mar 3 2020 10:00PM 03/03/2020 10:00 PM
Thank you for your support.
To make it a little bit more clear. Type A to Type B:
Type A
Mar 3 2020 10:00PM (:00PM is not a typo, that's how the system gives me the value)
TYPE B
COLUMN 1----COLUMN2
03/03/2020---- 10:00 PM
Hello!
If I understood correctly, you want to split the text into 2 parts. Use "M" as separator.
Please use the following formula:
=LEFT(A1,FIND("M ",A1,1))
=RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-FIND("M ",A1,1)-1)
Hello Alexander!
I'm sorry but that's not what I want to do. On COLUMN A it will show the text "Mar 3 2020 10:34PM"
What I want is that in COLUMN B will show the date in number format>>> 03/03/2020
And in COLUMN C it will show the time>>> 10:34 PM
I tried the formulas that you provided and they gave me #VALUE! error.
The CSV text comes like this:
Sep 7 2020 5:14PM
Sep 11 2020 1:12AM
Sep 18 2020 10:18PM
Mar 3 2020 10:34PM
I want to make it: mm/dd/yyyy
And on another column: h:mm AM/PM
Hello!
The formula I sent to you was created based on the description you provided in your first request. However, as far as I can see from your second comment, your task is now different from the original one. Hence, the formula fails to work.
Dear sirs, can I ask for a wee bit of your expertise since my own is not enough in this case?
I am looking to do comparisons between quarters during the year but with the closing balance date fixed from previous year. Let me explain:
E.g. QUARTER 4(b)=2020-12-31, QUARTER 3(c)=2020-09-30, Closing balance (QUARTER 4(a))=2019-12-31.
I have created formulas for Q4(b) and Q3(c) (linked to another date cell) respecively so that when Q4(b)=>Q1(b), Q3(c)=>Q4(c). But, i want the Closing balance date Q4(a) (ie. 2019-12-31) to remain the same during the year UNTILL the new accounting year starts. So when Q1(b)=2021-03-31, Q4(c)=2020-12-31 and Q4(a)=2020-12-31.
In words, Q(b) and Q(c) change during the year where Q(a) remain the same with previous year's closing date, and it's only when the Q(b)/Q(c) year change as Q(a) changes closing date one year forward.
I find the Q(a) value quite tricky to solve.
Thank you and regards,
Daniel
I cannot do calculation with "9/25/2019 12:00:00 AM". It seems it is text. How can I convert it to "Sep 25 2019"? I want to do a subtraction with another cell in that format to get the days in between.
Hello!
If your date is written as text, you can convert it to a real date using the formula
=DATE(MID(E1,FIND("~",SUBSTITUTE(E1,"/","~",2),1)+1,FIND(" ",E1,1) - FIND("~",SUBSTITUTE(E1,"/","~",2),1)-1), LEFT(E1, SEARCH("/",E1,1)-1), MID(E1,FIND("~",SUBSTITUTE(E1,"/","~",1),1)+1, FIND("~",SUBSTITUTE(E1,"/","~",2),1) - FIND("~",SUBSTITUTE(E1,"/","~",1),1)-1))
Then set the date format you want in the cell.