Date Format in Excel

Excel Date Format

In excel we have different types of formats available for numbers, text and even dates, for date we have many inbuilt formats or we can customize our own format which excels can recognize, also there are various function in worksheet and VBA which are used to make any random date to a recognizable format to excel, In excel date format can be accessed from the number option in home tab or the format option from the right-click to a cell.

Excel stores date as serial numbers and according to the format given by the user, it will display the date in the excel. The date is the one thing which leads to many confusion because it can be formatted in many ways. Having in-depth knowledge about dates is a great skill to have in your resume.

Excel can store the date from 01^st Jan 1900, anything you try to store before this date excel will not recognize any dates prior to this date.

Assume you have number 1 in the cell.

Apply date format to it and see what will be the result.

Select the above date format and you will see the date as 01 January 1900.

Similarly, 2 will be formatted as 02 January 1900 and 3 will be formatted as 03 January 1900. This is the basis of date format in excel.

#1 – How to Change Date Format in Excel?

We can change the date format as per our wish. Take the below data for the demonstration purpose.

Now we need to change the format to something like this 25 February 2018. So follow the below steps.

Step 1: Select all the dates first.

Step 2: Right-click and select Format Excel Cells or else you can press Ctrl + 1 as the shortcut key.

Step 3: You will see the below window now.

Step 4: Now go to Custom.

Step 5: Right now we have the dd-mm-yyyy format. So change this to dd-mmmm-yyyy.

Step 6: After the above format applied click on Ok. We will have results like this now.

#2 – Different Types of Date Formats

Format 1: Like this, we can change the date format however we want. Now apply below code to see the result as 25-Feb-2018.

Code: dd-mmm-yyyy

We have a result like this now.

Format 2: Now apply the code dd mmm yyyy to have a date without separators.

Code: dd mm yyyy

The result will be as follows.

Format 3: Like how we can show full month name, similarly we can also show day with respective day name with the short name and full name.

The result will be as follows.

Format 4: In order to have a full day and full month the code is “dddd mmmm yyyy”.

The result will be as follows.

We have seen how date format changes in excel according to the format given by the user.

Below are the codes and their result.

Day Code:

Month Code:

Year Code:

#3 – How to Fix Date Errors in Excel?

We have learned the dynamics of date format in excel. Sometimes when we download the data from the web we usually don’t get to see the exact date format as we wanted, we need to fix those errors.

If the date is formatted as TEXT then we don’t see accurate dates.

In order to fix this issue, we have several methods to excel. Apply the VALUE Excel function to get the serial number from this text formatted dates.

VALUE function converts the text looking number to an actual number.

VALUE function returns the result as serial numbers. Now apply a date format to have proper dates.

Now we have proper dates.

Some times when we download the data from the web we usually don’t get proper date format, one such case is the date with the backslash.

Step 1: Press Ctrl + H to open FIND & REPLACE Excel dialogue box.

Step 2: In the Find what: box type backslash (\). and in Replace with: enter forward slash (/).

Step 4: Click on Replace All, we will have results like this.

Things to Remember

• Excel always treats the date as serial numbers.
• If you have an incorrect date format use the VALUE function to convert the text value to date format.
• Instead of the VALUE function, we can also use DATEVALUE Excel.
• We can change the date format as per the given codes in excel.

Recommended Articles

This has been a guide to Date Format in Excel. Here we discuss how to change and custom format Dates in Excel with practical examples and downloadable excel template. You may also look at these useful functions in excel –

• Concatenate Columns in Excel
• Convert Date to Text in Excel
• Insert Date in Excel
• Concatenate Date in Excel