Update date format in excel

You may also want to learn: Convert Number and Date to Text. If you need to display dates in the short or long format with default settings, you may do it by following this:. For that, I chose the above example dates that were formatted in the custom format see the last graphic :. Now, go to the Home tab and in the Number group, click the Number Format box as shown below:. The TEXT function takes two arguments as shown below:. The TEXT function for formatting dates can particularly be useful if you want to keep the original date column in place and displaying another date-set based on those dates.

The corresponding B cells will display the dates in full month name, day and year in four digits format. After you get the result in B2 cell by writing the above formula, bring the mouse over the right bottom of the B2 cell. The Excel will update the corresponding A cells with respect to B cells automatically. The following example displays the dates in day with leading zero , short month name and year in two-digit format. See the example below where day name Sunday, Monday etc.

The TEXT function is more than formatting dates; this is just one usage that I explained in above section. Let us get more comfortable with date formatting and create more useful text strings as a result of joining different cells with constant literals. In the example below, column A contains Names and column B date of births. After the dates have been converted to real dates, you can format them with the Number Format commands. Click the dialog launcher, at the bottom right of the Number group on the Ribbon, to see more formats.

The date formatting should work correctly, after you have converted the text dates to real dates. To try the steps in this tutorial, download the sample Excel Dates Fix Format workbook.

The file is zipped, and is in xlsx file format, The file does not contain any macros. This problematic situation can happen anytime and with anyone so you all need to be prepared for fixing up this Excel date format messes up smartly.

The second possibility is that while trying to sort that dates column, all the data get arranged in the incorrect order. Resolving date not changing in Excel issue is not that tough task to do but for that, you need to know the right solution. Here are fixes that you need to apply for fixing up this problem of Excel not recognizing date format.

All your problem of Excel not recognizing date format is now been fixed in just a few seconds. In the shown figure, you can see there is an imported dates column in which both data and time are showing. But nothing happened date format not changing in Excel. Now the question arises why Excel date format is not changing? Mainly this happens because Excel is considering these dates as text.

Having doubt whether your date cell content is also counted as text then check out these signs to clear your doubt. For such a task, the best solution is to use the Text to Columns feature of Excel.

Here is how it is to be used.