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

I had a similar problem. My Excel sheet had 102,300 rows and one column with date was messy. No amount of tricks were working. spent a whole day entering crazy formulas online to no success. See the snips

1. How the column looked ("Short Date" format on Excel)

The red circled cell contents (problematic ones) do not change at all regardless of what tricks you do. Including deleting them manually and entering the figures in "DD-MM-YYYY" format, or copying and pasting format from the blue ones. Basically, nothing worked...STUBBORNNESS!!

2. How the column looked ("Long date" format on Excel)

As can be seen, the cell contents doesn't change no matter what.

3. How I solved it

The only way to solve this is to:

1. upload the Excel sheet to Google Drive. On Google Drive do this:

2. click to open the file with Google spreadsheet

3. Once it has opened as a Google spreadsheet, select the entire column with dates.

4. select the format type to Date (you can choose any format of date you want).

5. Download the Google spreadsheet as .xlsx. All the contents of the column are now dates