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

Answer 2

Another way to address a few cells in one column that won't convert is to copy them off to Notepad, then CLEAR ALL (formatting and contents) those cells and paste the cell contents in Notepad back into the same cells.

Then you can set them as Date, or Text or whatever.

Clear Formatting did not work for me. Excel 365, probably version 2019.

Answer 3

Select the cells you want to format. Press CTRL+1. In the Format Cells box, click the Number tab. In the Category list, click Date. Under Type, pick a date format.

Answer 4

DATEVALUE function will help if date is stored as a text as in

=DATEVALUE("Jan 19, 2015 03:00:00 PM")

Answer 5

With your data in A1, in B1 enter:

=DATEVALUE(MID(A1,1,12))

and format B1 as dd/mm/yyyy For example:

If the cell appears to have a date/time, but it does not respond to format changes, it is probably a Text value rather than a genuine date/time.

Answer 6

Struggled with this issue for 20 mins today. My issue was the same as MARIO's in this thread, but my solution is easier. If you look at his answer above, the blue circled dates are "month/day/year", and the red dates are "day/month/year". Changing the red date format to match the blue date format, then selecting all of them, right click, Format Cells, Category "Date", select the Type desired. The Red dates can be changed manually, or use some other excel magic to swap the day and month.