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Changing date format into a text format

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cdumais Posts 1 Registration date Thursday 17 November 2016 Status Member Last seen 17 November 2016 - 17 Nov 2016 à 16:07
fdibbins Posts 33 Registration date Sunday 19 June 2016 Status Contributor Last seen 20 November 2016 - 20 Nov 2016 à 19:21
Hello,
I need to change a date format like 2/1/16 into a text number formatted like this 02/01/2016 or like this 020116? Is there a way to do this?

Thanks,
carol



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Réponse 1 / 2
yg_be Posts 23437 Registration date Sunday 8 June 2008 Status Contributor Last seen 6 June 2025 5
17 Nov 2016 à 16:35
do you mean you want to replace the content of cells containing dates, and store text instead?
could you explain why you want to do that?
Réponse 2 / 2
fdibbins Posts 33 Registration date Sunday 19 June 2016 Status Contributor Last seen 20 November 2016 1
20 Nov 2016 à 19:21
1st, you need to make sure that your "date" really IS a date, and not text that just looks like a date - text with =isnumber(A1) where A1 is the cell containing your date. FALSE tells you that is not a real date.

What you need to understand about dates and times in excel is…

a date is just a number representing the number of days passed since 1/1/900...and then formatted in a way that we recognize as a date. So, for instance, today (Sun 20 Nov 2016) is actually 42694

Time is actually a decimal part of 1 (day), so 06:00 AM is 0.25, 12 noon is 0.5 and 18:00 (or 6 PM) is 0.75

So, having said that, and assuming that you really DO have dates, you just need to change the date format to suite your needs.

rt click the cell, select Format, then select Date from the window that appears. You will see a number of different formats, pick 1 that suites your needs