How to work with dates in Microsoft Excel

Question

Working With Dates In Excel

Working with dates can be challenging in Excel. Sometimes no matter what you try, you can't get dates to format, adding times can be challenging, and creating graphs can fail.

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Answer 1

One common problem is when using the format drop down on the home tab. Often, you will select a range of cells, change the format to date, but the cells do not convert to date. This is usually discovered when making a pivot table or trying to sort cells by date order.

How to overcome this:

1. Select the range of cells you want to convert to date
2. Navigate to the Data tab
3. Select Text To Columns Tool
4. Make sure Delimited radio button is selected
5. Click next
6. On the next screen, uncheck all the check boxes under Delimiter
7. Click next to proceed to the next screen
8. On the next screen under Column Data Format, select the Date radio button and make sure MDY is in the dropdown list
9. Click finish!

Now your dates should be formatted and you can enjoy sorting by date, using dates in pivot tables, and much more!