The date is formatted to MDY (mm/dd/yyyy). This is a format used only in the US and a few smaller countries. The first way, you can convert date is to use the Format Cells window. In order to do it, click cell B3, then click the right mouse button and select the Format Cells option. It is usually best to convert them to the standard Excel date format. Excel has an entire array of functions you can use to work with them once you do (you can learn about them here). Excel’s string manipulation functions can help you convert date text to the Excel date format. Let’s walk through an example Decimal Separated Date Example. To convert a text date in a cell to a serial number, use the DATEVALUE function. Then copy the formula, select the cells that contain the text dates, and use Paste Special to apply a date format to them. Follow these steps: Select a blank cell and verify that its number format is General.
To ungroup dates in a Pivot Table, simply right-click on the dates column and select ungroup. Or, you can go to the PivotTable Analyze tab and select Ungroup. Once this is done, the data will be ungrouped again. Control Automatic Grouping. If you wish to, you can easily turn off this automatic date grouping feature in Excel 2016. Using DATEDIF Function (Get Number of Completed Months Between Two Dates) Using YEARFRAC Function (Get Total Months Between Two Dates) Using the YEAR and MONTH Formula (Count All Months when the Project was Active) Using DATEDIF Function (Get Number of.
Dates can be awkward in Excel. The most prevalent format worldwide is Day-Month-Year (DMY), but not all countries follow it. One such country you might have heard of that differs from this “standard” is the US, where it is commonplace to use Month-Day-Year (MDY).
Speaking from personal experience, I remember one project manager was nearly fired after he thought the deadline was 1 March 2015 when it was in fact 3 January 2015. This is the danger of 1/3/15, for example.
To show you how to overcome this problem, I will illustrate with converting US dates to what is often known as the “European” date format. Now, I know many readers would prefer this to be the other way around. I apologise, but I am an Australian Brit with the appropriate regional settings on my machine, and it’s a little awkward to perform screenshots that way. Don’t worry though — just follow me in reverse.
The problem becomes significant when you receive date data in a spreadsheet that is not recognised by your regional settings — or worse, actually is, like my unfortunate project manager mentioned above. For me, my computer cannot make sense of US date formats such as those shown in the screenshot below.
I have left the data in “General” style deliberately so you can see only one entry, cell A4, is recognised as a number (date). The problem is, even that’s wrong as that represents 5 December 2022, not 12 May 2022.
How do I convert it? We could use Power Query / Get & Transform — but that’s not really what this article is about. There is an easy way in Excel — but first, let’s start with a hard way.
In the screenshot below, I have managed to fix the issue:
See? Easy. Oh, sorry, I didn’t display the formula I used to do this in the image. Here it is for cell C2:
Any questions?
I have provided the formula because I am frustrated by the number of times I have read on the internet that this is not possible formulaically. Rubbish. You would just be a little insane to do it that way.
I won't explain this formula. Suffice to say it only works for converting US dates to European dates; the text strings are delimited with “/” and do not contain “@” in the text string. If you want the conversion to go the other way, simply replace d/m/yyin all instances above with m/d/yy.
Having said that, I think we are all agreed we need another — simpler — way. Let’s start again. Back to the original data, I make a copy in cells C2:C11, as shown in the screenshot below.
I do this so I may retain the original data (it’s always best to keep a copy in case you make a mistake). Next, I highlight cells C1:C11(including the header) and click on Text to Columns in the Data Tools grouping of the Data tab of the ribbon (Alt+A+E):
This generates the Convert Text to Columns Wizard dialog box. In Step 1, choose the Delimited option and click Next.
This means the data will be split into columns based upon a specified delimiter. Except we are going to cheat and not do that. In Step 2, uncheck all delimiters and then click Next, as shown below:
Now we come to the step that we actually want. We don’t use the Text to Columns feature to split data into separate columns. No, I want Excel to recognise my data as dates.
In this final step, select the Date: option in the Column data format and choose the date format that matches the data as it currently is — not what you want it to be. You are asking Excel to recognise it. In my case, the data is in Month-Day-Year format (MDY), so this is what I selected. Once you have chosen, click Finish.
Convert Dates In Excel To Weeks
I think you will agree this is far simpler than the formulaic approach and, more importantly, works for all date scenarios — as long as the original dates are formatted consistently.
As you keep working with dates, you will appreciate more and more the need for consistent dates — and the fact that they really aren’t that difficult to manipulate once you know the tricks.
— Liam Bastick, FCMA, CGMA, FCA, is director of SumProduct, a global consultancy specialising in Excel training. He is also an Excel MVP (as appointed by Microsoft) and author of Introduction to Financial Modelling. Send ideas for future Excel-related articles to him at liam.bastick@sumproduct.com. To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Jeff Drew, an FM magazine senior editor, at Jeff.Drew@aicpa-cima.com.
This tutorial shows how to Convert date to Julian format in Excel using example below.
If you need to convert a date to a Julian date format in Excel, you can do so by building a formula that uses the TEXT, YEAR, and DATE functions.
Formula
Explanation
Background
“Julian date format” refers to a format where the year value of a date is combined with the “ordinal day for that year” (i.e. 14th day, 100th day, etc.) to form a date stamp.
There are several variations. A date in this format may include a 4-digit year (yyyy) or a two-digit year (yy) and the day number may or may not be padded with zeros to always use 3 digits. For example, for the date January 21, 2017, you might see:
Solution
For a two-digit year + a day number without padding use:
For a two-digit year + a day number padded with zeros to 3 places:
For a four-digit year + a day number padded with zeros to 3 places:
How this formula works
This formula builds the final result in 2 parts, joined by concatenation with the ampersand (&) operator.
On the left of the ampersand, we generate the year value. To extract a 2-digit year, we can use the TEXT function, which can apply a number format inside a formula:
To extract a full year, use the YEAR function:
On the right side of the ampersand we need to figure out the day of year. We do this by subtracting the last day of the previous year from the date we are working with. Because dates are just serial numbers, this will give us the “nth” day of year.
Convert Dates In Excel To Yyyymmdd
To get the last day of year of the previous year, we use the DATE function. When you give DATE a year and month value, and a zero for day, you get the last day of the previous month. So:
gives us the last day of the previous year, which is December 31, 2015 in the example.
Now we need to pad the day value with zeros. Again, we can use the TEXT function:
Reverse Julian date
If you need to convert a Julian date back to a regular date, you can use a formula that parses Julian date and runs it through the date function with a month of 1 and day equal to the “nth” day. For example, this would create a date from a yyyyddd Julian date like 1999143.
If you just have a day number (e.g. 100, 153, etc.), you can hard-code the year and insert the day this:
Where A1 contains the day number. This works because the DATE function knows how to adjust for values that are out of range.