Forum Discussion

jay_sharma_909's avatar
jay_sharma_909
Copper Contributor
Sep 27, 2022
Solved

date format

how do you format  "Tue, 13 Sep 2022 20:11:32 GMT" to  "mm/dd/yyyy h:mm" ? Thanks

  • jay_sharma_909 

    You cannot simply format such a value as date/time since Excel does not recognize it as a date/time.

    Let's say you have such a value in A2.

    Enter the following formula in B2, and format B2 as mm/dd/yyyy h:mm.

    You can fill this down if required.

     

    =1*SUBSTITUTE(MID(A2,6,50)," GMT","")

  • jay_sharma_909 

    You cannot simply format such a value as date/time since Excel does not recognize it as a date/time.

    Let's say you have such a value in A2.

    Enter the following formula in B2, and format B2 as mm/dd/yyyy h:mm.

    You can fill this down if required.

     

    =1*SUBSTITUTE(MID(A2,6,50)," GMT","")

    • jay_sharma_909's avatar
      jay_sharma_909
      Copper Contributor
      It worked perfectly. Thanks Hans 🙂 Would you please explain what is that function telling? wanted to understand!
      • HansVogelaar's avatar
        HansVogelaar
        MVP

        jay_sharma_909 

         

        MID(A2,6,50) removes the first 5 characters from the string: in your example the "Tue, " part. (50 is just an arbitrary number larger than the length of the string). So we are left with

         

        3 Sep 2022 20:11:32 GMT

         

        SUBSTITUTE(MID(A2,6,50)," GMT","") removes " GMT" from the end, so we now have

         

        3 Sep 2022 20:11:32

         

        Excel is able to recognize this text string as a date/time value. We just have to force it into a number (Excel stores dates and times as numbers). One way to do that is to multiply the value with 1. This may seem strange, but when we multiply, Excel tries its best to treat the value supplied as a number. We could also have used

         

        =SUBSTITUTE(MID(A2,6,50)," GMT","")+0

         

        or

         

        =--SUBSTITUTE(MID(A2,6,50)," GMT","")

Resources