Date Formatting Won't Change

[Steve Gould]

I have an excel column that includes dates currently formatted as MM/DD/YYYY. I want it formatted as YYYY/MM/DD. When I go to format cells and change the date format, nothing changes. If I try to change the cells to any other type of cell - general, text, number, time, whatever - nothing changes. 

Please help. 

[#2]

Has anyone found a solution to this? I am having your exact same issue. Tried windows settings, number formatting, custom formatting. I am at my wit's end. @jwellesley2022 

[#3]

Definitely, it is a bug in Excel. Open source spreadsheets (OpenOffice, LibreOffice) behave the way Excel should/did.

[#4]

@PetalumaDon 

I wouldn't call it a bug since Excel is most likely behaving exactly intended.  If the date is not provided in a format that conforms to your machine locale it will be read as text and no amount of number formatting will help.  If you are importing the data, it should be possible to use PowerQuery to convert the date format or, within Excel, date to columns can be instructed to accept 'foreign' formats.

Have a look at @Sergei Baklan 's replies in this thread.

[#5]

@Peter Bartholomew 

Has anyone notice that some Access 2016 tables show up and some don't since last update?

The table is there but nothing is visible when you look at the query of the table.

[#6]

This solved my issue. thankss!

[#7]

This formatting problem occurred in my pivot table. If this is the case for anyone, you must first select the date cell column, select PivotTable Analyze, Ungroup.

[#8]

@Steve Gould 

A similar thing happening here too

I'm on a pivot table with a separate sheet for the data. The date formats are all correct, field is unlocked, laptop's geeral settings are all right, the date column on the raw data sheet is all right and set to dd/mm/yyy, yet when it reflects onto the pivot table sheet it show up as "May" for example. Why is that? It's driving me crazy. 

Would appreciate the help.

[#9]

This is excel bug & no one can fix it. Thats all. Basically it happens when data comes from CSV or text file

[#10]

@Steve Gould  Hi steve, i have the same problem too not until i tried to change my computer’s date format and language to “Europe English” try adding it to your language settings if you’re trying to format your date to “MMDDYY” or else if USA english which is the default “DDMMYY” or try typing the date first for example 23 November 2023. Then restart your computer then try again to format your date. Hope this helps solve your problem.