Forum Discussion
Why Excel read "31/12/2022" as text instead of date?
Did you use a different date format in Windows (or Mac) when you originally entered 31/12/2022?
If your system date format at the time was m/d/yyyy, as is usual in the USA, 31/12/2022 would not be recognized as a date.
Hi Hans,
Thanks for your reply.
The dates in other cells are working well... that's the part puzzled me. Please find the screen shot below (the left column is the original dates I input and the right column is using formula "=xxx" so only that cell returns text).
Cheers,
Apparently, Excel interpreted the value as text when you entered it. There are several possible causes, but it's impossible for us to determine which one it actually was.
Thanks Hans. Is it possible for you to give me some examples of possible causes? so that I can trace down what I did and locate the most likely cause.
Cheers,
- The cell had accidentally been formatted as Text.
- You accidentally inserted an apostrophe ' before the value.
- The value was copied/pasted from another source, for example a web page.