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clarkej's avatar
clarkej
Occasional Reader
Apr 15, 2026

MO 365 Excel - Difficulty Changing a Date format

I am using MO 365  - apps for Business, currently received an Excel Spreadsheet and am attempting to change date format in Excel and have tried all the usual methods however the dates remain unchanged.

I need to change the date  from month /day/year  as 1/31/2025 to Year/Month/Day 2025/1/31

Any Suggestions?

 

Thanks

CJ

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1 Reply

  • m_tarler's avatar
    m_tarler
    Silver Contributor
    Apr 15, 2026

    if you have tried various date formats and they haven't changed, my guess is they are actually TEXT that just look like dates.  You can try DATA -> Text to Columns and just next through to step 3 and select Date: MDY and then Finish.  After that the data should now be actual dates and you can change the format accordingly (under 'more number formats' and then Date and yyyy-mm-dd is listed 3rd on my app or you can go to custom and specify yyyy/m/d for the format you listed but note I believe the international standard (ISO 8601) is actually yyyy-mm-dd (and there are some variants allowed but I don't believe the use of / is one of them).