Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Entering Dates in Excel.
Dates are a special case in Excel. If you enter information that can be translated as a date (by any stretch of the imagination), then Excel treats it as a date. It converts your data into a serial number that is internally used to represent dates and times. For instance, any of the following entries will be translated to a date by Excel:
If you enter the first example, Excel will convert it to a date and display that date as best it can determine. If you leave off the year in your entry, Excel assumes you mean the current year. You could also use dashes instead of slashes and Excel will still figure out you are entering a date.
Regardless of how you type a date, it is converted to a special serial number by Excel and stored internally in that format. How you see the date on your screen is a consequence of how the cell is formatted. Even though Excel stores dates in a standard format internally, they can be displayed using any number of different formats.
Understanding that Excel will always try to convert an entry into a date if it can—by any stretch of the imagination—be considered a date, you may be tempted to ask how you can stop Excel from doing such conversions. There are only two ways I've been able to come up with:
Either of the first two approaches forces Excel to treat your entry as text, not as a date. The third approach treats the entry as an actual formula, such that Excel would convert =5/22 to 0.22727273, which is 5 divided by 22.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (12386) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Entering Dates in Excel.
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2018-03-12 13:11:46
Julius
"Understanding that Excel will always try to convert an entry into a date if it can—by any stretch of the imagination—be considered a date, you may be tempted to ask how you can stop Excel from doing such conversions."
* Format the cell as Text before entering a value in the cell.
The above paragraph was useful to resolve a problem I was engaged.
Thank you. I see the paragraph is not included in your July 2017 version of this tip.
2017-05-12 18:36:28
Fred
Barry and Peter, thanks. I'll see if I can get that idea working.
Fred
2017-05-12 05:03:24
I had a similar problem a year or so ago. The basic problem is that Excel isn't recognising the date as a date.
You can use a helper column with a formula that pulls the downloaded date apart and puts it back together as a date that Excel will recognise. Or as I did I created a macro to do this which I run immediately after I do the download (in fact the macro does the download and converts the dates, on a time schedule automatically).
There are other tips on this site that cover formulas to pull dates apart, and put them back together again.
https://excelribbon.tips.net/T009779_Converting_an_Unsupported_Date_Format.html
https://excelribbon.tips.net/T011400_Entering_Dates_without_Separators.html
You'll have to modify the formulas/macros to suit the particular format of your dates.
2017-05-12 03:41:39
peter b
Fred,
Have you thought about using helper cells to process the ""Monday, January 1, 2017" dates?
e.g. the extract the year using right(4)... extract the day of month using mid and finding the 2nd comma.. and use vlookup for converting the text of the month into a number.. and then recombine them all using the date() function.
Peter
2017-05-11 13:23:44
Fred
Peter,
Thanks, but I can't change the format of the data before downloading it (it comes from another company that has little interest in helping its customers... but that's another story).
I'm not sure what you mean by preformatting. I use a web interface to download their data as an Excel file.
And finally, applying the formatting -- any type of date format --to those dates just doesn't work. Which is why I have to go through and manually change Every. Single. Date.
2017-05-11 12:00:28
Peter Atherton
Fred
I don't know about downloading from database but you could try preformatting using the following
dddd, mmmm d, yyyy
If that fails sellect all the dates and apply that formatting.
2017-05-10 11:05:22
Fred
Allen,
I have to download data from a database that has dates written like this: "Monday, January 1, 2017". Even if I tell Excel (2013 and/or 2016) that this column is dates, and even if I tell Excel to format that column of dates exactly the same way (which is indeed one of the pull-down options for formatting dates) Excel still won't recognize those cells as dates. Thus, I have to go through every export and manually reenter all the dates so that Excel will recognize them.
Do you have any ideas how avoid this?
Thanks,
Fred
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: 
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