Forum Discussion
Date Formatting Won't Change
- Finally figured this out.
Change the date format of your computer from the taskbar.
Regardless of timezone and all, go to your task bar> click the time/date > region >then look for additional date, time & regional settings > change date, time and number formats> additional settings> then go to the date tab and you can manually set the format by using the MMM dd yyyy or whichever format you want it in. Restart your computer and it should work on excel.
Wew
Dear Sergei,
this was an older question but I have the same problem and was wondering if you may be able to assist.
I have a brand new Sheet and want to have 8 columns and 3 of them are a date.
I have inserted 10.10.2018. Then I go to Format Cells / Date / 14 March 2012 and hit ok.
Now the date should be shown as 10 October 2018 but it does not change at all.
Also tried other custom variants for dates but it just stays as it is as 10.10.2018.
Is there any general setting that is wrong?
Thank you
regards
Chris
Hi Chris,
What is your default (system) date format? To check you may hit Ctrl+1 on any cell and select Date. First two formats in the right pane will be marked by asterisk, these are so called short and long dates. In my case it looks like
You shall enter dates as in first record, i.e. 10/10/2018 (instead of 10.10.2018) if you see in above 14/03/2012. Otherwise you have some text in form of dates, not dates as Excel recognizes them.
In brief, most probably you enter dates as text
- This solved my issue. thankss!
SergeiBaklan After trying the solutions proposed and seeing no changes as I wanted it to be :
01/02/2020 to be 1st of February 2020 in the form dd/mm, I tried entering 1 FEB and it worked as 01/02/2020 finally, i customised to dd/mmm and it all changed at last.
I hope what I did will help others.
I have a similar situation currently.
I am working with about 200 000 rows across 10 columns.
My first column contained the date and time. I separated these. My dates are somewhat repetitive since data was collected every 5 minutes for 2 years.
All my dates from the first one to the 90 754th one will not format correctly. Excel is reading it as year, month day, when I need it should be month, day, year. For example, my dates are reading 05/04/15 (y/m/d) but i need 05 to be the month, 04 to be the day and 15 to be the year.
All my dates below 90 754 are correct.
I have tried formatting them so many different times. I have spent the last three hours trying to figure this out.
I spent days stitching my data together. I don't want to have to redo it because I can't get this right.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
The result of a failed date input tends to be some entries that look like dates but as text and in the wrong format and other entries that have been converted to numeric dates for calculation but are probably the wrong dates.
If it is text the formula should use MID to pick out the values and reassemble them to look like the default date on your machine before coercing to a date-value.
For the entries that are already numbers you would need to pick out the
yr := DAY(date),
m := YEAR(date)
d := MONTH(date)
using these date functions, and the rebuild the date you need using
= DATE(yr, m, d)
Which conversion strategy to use is dictated by the result of
= IF(ISNUMBER(date), ..., ...)
Importing dates using Power Query can provide a good alternative strategy.
Thanks so much for the fast reply.
I looked up what the first ones look like under date and it is same as yours.
What I did now:
I marked all cells and chose format text. Then I chose those cells that are supposed to have a date format and chose the first option as with the asterisk in your screenshot.
Then I entered the date as you said in this way: 10/10/2018
But it shows now exactly how I entered it as 10/10/2018. But if I chose in the format the first option: should it then not show it the way it is displayed in that box?
What I actually wanted is to have e.g. in A2 a date and in A3 this date plus 5 days as it should serve as a follow up due date and put some conditional formatting to it with colours if it is overdue to follow up.
Hope this makes sense.
But even though I inserted it now as a date (I hope) and put into A3 then =A2+5 it just shows "Value" but according to some other forum info it should add the to the days and would give me then in theory 15/10/2018.
Not sure what I do wrong :-(
Thanks
Chris
Chris,
1) Don't format all cells as text before you start to work with them, keep default format (General).
2) Enter the date not as on my screenshot, but in one which you see in your formatting options. We may have different default date formats.
After that =A2+5 shall work. In behind dates in Excel are just sequential integer numbers starting from 1 which is 01 January, 1900. And 13 Oct 2018 is 43386. On the top is only formatting.
Thanks kindly!
Is there a possibility to amend somewhere the default format to e.g. dd/mm/yyyy ?
Or how is the default date format set?
Is this depending on which version one works?
Thank you!
