excel date formatting not working

Question

I have an excel sheet created by a 3rd party program.

One of the columns has dates in this format: \"Jan 19, 2015 03:00:00 PM\"

I would like these dates to appea

Answer 1

While you didn't tag VBA as a possible solution, you may be able to use what some feel is a VBA shortcoming to your advantage; that being VBA heavily defaulted to North American regional settings unless explicitly told to use another.

Tap Alt+F11 and when the VBE opens, immediately use the pull down menus to Insert ► Module (Alt+I,M). Paste the following into the pane titles something like Book1 - Module1 (Code).

Sub mdy_2_dmy_by_Sel()
    Dim rDT As Range
    With Selection
        .Replace what:=Chr(160), replacement:=Chr(32), lookat:=xlPart
        .TextToColumns Destination:=.Cells(1, 1), DataType:=xlFixedWidth, FieldInfo:=Array(0, 1)
        For Each rDT In .Cells
            rDT = CDate(rDT.Value2)
        Next rDT
        .NumberFormat = "dd/mm/yyyy"
    End With
End Sub

Tap Alt+Q to return to your worksheet. Select all of the dates (just the dates, not the whole column) and tap Alt+F8 to Run the macro.

Note that both date and time are preserved. Change the cell number format if you wish to see the underlying times as well as the dates.