Forum Discussion
Excel doesnot recognize the date until duble click
I have problem in Excel , I copied dates from internet report to Excel but Excel does not recognize them as date till I press double click and Enter in each cell of the date column I tried many ways...
Hi Abdullah
One possible solution is to highlight the column of dates and then select Data > Text to columns > Finish
This "tricks" Excel into treating text as numbers
Alternatively copy a blank cell then highlight the dates and Paste Special > Add
This again tricks Excel into adding 0 to each cell and therefore the text gets converted to values
I had nearly 200K date of births in format 01/Nov/1972 that I was not able to convert to date format I prefer - 01/11/1972 until I double click the column. To do this manually for 200K+ records would be time consuming and wastage. Thanks for your suggestion above Wyn Hopkins, this really helped - highlight column and "select Data > Text to columns > Finish"