Thread: Excel help - converting date to text

It's just formatting Mick. Right mouse click on the cell (or highlight the range of cells then right click on the area) and go to formatting. There will be a date option, with a hundred different dates displays.

Or are you trying to export it all in text or other for at, and it's giving you a weird 68*** type number?

Highlight the box or boxes, right click then click 'format cells'. In the category list there is 'text'. Click on this, then 'ok'. What you type in that box now will be as you hit the keys.

Mick,

Do you actually want excel to see it as text?... or you want it to look like you second example ?

As the others have said, right click the cell and choose "Format Cells" then you can either change it to text.. or under date... choose the style of date you want ..that way the spreadsheet still understands it's a date if you need it to.

Originally Posted by Bytemrk

Mick,

Do you actually want excel to see it as text?... or you want it to look like you second example ?

As the others have said, right click the cell and choose "Format Cells" then you can either change it to text.. or under date... choose the style of date you want ..that way the spreadsheet still understands it's a date if you need it to.

Thankyou for reading my post Mr Bytemrk.
Yes, indeed, I want excel to see it as text.
It is not a formatting issue. I know how to format dates.
As we know, excel stores dates as a serial date which is how many days from 0-Jan-1900. 41855 returns a date of 4/8/14 (or 4/8/2014). This figure is useless to me as I want to use the date as text in functions.
It's easy to convert text to date but that is opposite to what I require.

I can extract the day, month and year in separate functions but it extracts 4/8/14 as 4, 8 and 2014 when I need 04, 08 and 14 to put them in a function to return 04-08-14. 4-8-2014 as text doesn't cut it.

Here ya go Captain Grumpy

=TEXT(B2,"dd-mm-yy") where B2 is the cell reference to be converted.

Difficult to tell someone's level of Excel proficiency in the space of a few words.

Thankyou Blind Freddy.

I had tried that. Sadly, it doesn't work.
Although it displays as required in a cell, it doesn't display as that in a function. It comes up with #REF when I try to use that cell in a function.

What function are you trying to use it in?