Excel only sees my dates as numbers, regardless of formatting. Help!

Hello everyone!

I am experiencing an extremely frustrating issue which I'm hoping someone can help me with. I'm attempting to create a scatter plot with the x-axis showing dates of every 3 months (ex: January 2022, April 2022, July 2022, etc). However, Excel is only viewing my date field values as numbers instead of dates. Because of this, I don't have the option to change the axis type per https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/topic/display-or-change-dates-on-a-category-axis-d5a8146b-d457-43d1-8602-c1d23c96d650#:~:text=on%20PivotChart%20reports.-,In%20the%20chart%2C%20right%2Dclick%20the%20category%20axis%2C%20and,Days%2C%20Months%2C%20or%20Years.. Instead, my axis options appear like this:

And my scatter plot appears like this:

The date field I am using is formatted as a date which is why this is so frustrating. Things I've tried so far:

• Changing the date format in the original field
• Creating a new field and calculating the date as text with =TEXT([datefield], "MM/DD/YYYY")
• Creating a new field and formatting the date like "Wednesday, March 14, 2022"
• Creating a new scatter plot and reselecting each of these new fields

None of these things have helped. If anyone has any suggestions, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!