Forum Discussion
Clair Huntley
Jul 05, 2018Copper Contributor
Date Formatting
I wonder if anyone could help me please? Its probably really simple but I can't for the life of me get Excel to do as I would like. On all our company graphs/pivots etc, date is displayed as ...
- Jul 05, 2018In your file, the value in A2 ia not a true date, but in fact text. But as soon as you edit that cell, Excel will try to assess what you entered, recognize the entry as a date and enter a true date into the cell. To avoid all of this, before making ANY edits to your data, Format the column in question as Text. Then do your edits.
JKPieterse
Jul 05, 2018Silver Contributor
What does it do for your pivots that you do not like precisely?
Clair Huntley
Jul 05, 2018Copper Contributor
Rather than having one entry per month, it creates one column per date, I inherited the spreadsheet, so older months are actually in YY/MM when I copy that down and change the month in the formatting bar, it goes straight to full date. Even though that column is custom formatted YY/MM it still puts new entries to full date (in the ribbon even though displaying in the actual data as YY/MM) so the custom formatting changes the display but not wherever it pulls from and display in the ribbon.
I have attached (I hope) an example of my spreadsheet which I hope will help explain what I mean
Thank you
Clair
- JKPieterseJul 05, 2018Silver ContributorIn your file, the value in A2 ia not a true date, but in fact text. But as soon as you edit that cell, Excel will try to assess what you entered, recognize the entry as a date and enter a true date into the cell. To avoid all of this, before making ANY edits to your data, Format the column in question as Text. Then do your edits.
- Brande FisherAug 02, 2018Copper ContributorI had the same issue and this worked. Is it a glitch in the new excel?
- JKPieterseAug 24, 2018Silver ContributorNo this problem has been around for years and is due to how data is entered or imported into Excel. If the source of the data is text, Excel will mark the values as text. So you need a way to convert the values to dates before creating pivottables.
- Clair HuntleyJul 05, 2018Copper Contributor
Thank you x a million.:-)
- Clair HuntleyJul 05, 2018Copper Contributor
how do I flag my thread as resolved please?
Thank you
Clair