Yes No. Thank you! Any more feedback? The more you tell us the more we can help. Can you help us improve? Resolved my issue. Clear instructions. Easy to follow. No jargon.
Pictures helped. Didn't match my screen. Incorrect instructions. Consider the following example. Supposing you have a list of telephone numbers in column A formatted as "" and you want to make them look more like phone numbers by adding hyphens. In other words, your goal is to turn "" into "". Inserting the first hyphen is easy. You write a usual Excel Replace formula that replaces zero characters with a hyphen, i.
The result of the above Replace formula is as follows:. Okay, and now we need to insert one more hyphen in the 8 th position. As the result, you get the phone numbers in the desired formatting:. And naturally, you are not limited in the number of functions you can nest within one formula the modern versions of Excel , and allow up to characters and up to 64 nested functions in a formula.
So far, in all the examples we have been dealing with values of a similar nature and have made replacements in the same position in each cell. But real-life tasks are often more complicated than that.
In your worksheets, the characters to be replaced may not necessarily appear in the same place in each cell, and therefore you will have to find the position of the first character that should be replaced. The following example will demonstrate what I'm talking about. Supposing you have a list of email addressing in column A. Power Query is the way to go. There is no way to prevent this, each time the excel file is opened, it will try to convert those. I have used this same spreadsheet for my data for several years now.
I opened it this morning and My columns are all in a text format. Instead of the date they all show numbers such as I have tried re-formatting back to the date but it will not let me. How can I get it to show the date? As you probably know, a numbers like is the date serial number. But even if the data in the cell is text, changing the format to short date or long date should convert it to a date e. You get an error message? How will it not let you?
How do I convert these to a recognizable date format. The dates look like Unix timestamps. These are the number of seconds since midnight on Jan 1st Anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this issue? Formatting is ignored by the PivotTable. Can you help me? Do you have any idea what was wrong with my formula? Thanks alot! If you enter this formula:. Instead you need to convert your dates to date serial numbers using one of the techniques described in this post.
Say I enter Nov 09 and I am half expecting that Excel will return the value Nov, which is the current year. The cell is under the Date format. However if I enter 09 Nov, it shows the correct date,.
Hi Kate, Try changing the date format from your system. Let us know if that helps. Regards, Catalin. My genealogy list of people and their birthdates in an excel sheet has changed itself to numbers like and I cannot get my dates back to a readable form dd mm yyyy. Have you tried applying the Date format from the Home tab of the ribbon? Hope you meant only format. Thanks for the tips. You could split the first year and second year across two columns and then join them back together with the forward slash e.
Hi Yousuf, You want exactly what you type in A1 to be in F1? This was very helpful. One of the best articles explaining date — text issues in excel. This cell is formatted to Date. If I change the format from date to general or to text, the cell will show: How can I resolve this problem in excell? Hence when you use a text function like left on the date, it will extract the number of characters from the underlying value.
That said, the rule of thumb is to stick to DATE functions when the value is a proper date, and work with TEXT functions if the value is formatted as a text. That sounds odd. Can I clarify some things; if you enter numbers in an empty file does it convert them to dates? What happens if you enter a negative number? Perhaps you can post your question on our Excel forum where you can share some screenshots.
Text columns worked awesomely for data with whole numbers — however for the early dates it was extracted as say instead of — How can I amend this please? Hi Swapna, if the cell is formatted as a date, that cell contains in fact a serial number, which is the numeric representation of the date. This number can be formatted in many ways, the number will not change.
If you need text in that cell, format that cell as text, and what you type there is what you will see. The best choice is to format as a date, there are many formats for dates, you can format it as dd. Make sure you type dates according to computer date formats, otherwise your dates will be wrong. Thank you for your reply, as i told you before i already make the changes in control panel date format and in excel sheet as well as also.
Why it is not to date?????? Hi Ashok, Can you upload screenshots of your regional settings? You can upload the images on our forum create an account, sign-in and create a new topic Catalin.
As per your suggestion i registered with in your forum and upload the images. Regional settings in Non-US Format. Please include my gmail address as below in your regular distribution.
The best way to handle dates is now Power Query: power-query-date-formats Cheers, Catalin. I have years saved as numbers. How do I fix this? You need the day and month portion as well. Please post a sample of your dates and the desired output on our Excel Forum so we can help you further. I think this is a bit different to those examples I have read. I need to sort a BIG list into date format.
I need help with my spread sheet! I have an imported. Is there a simpler way to combine these two cells into cell H1 as an Excel serial number. Hoping this clearly explains my current situation. I am still rather green at this and am currently limited to Excel Starter Any suggestions would be appreciated. Hi Catalin, I like the simplicity of your formula but I can not get it to work for me. Not sure what is wrong, it could be that I have overlooked something quite basic due to my lack of experience.
Type the double quotes from your keyboard, the html editor is replacing the quotes, and they are not recognized by excel. I converted my. Could this be an issue? If we could get this to function it could save me many many hours of work. I used Excel to open a. Used comma, delimited and General for the conversion. My data converted fine except for the dates.
Hi Kathy, Try to use left formula to return 8 numbers only. After that convert text values to numbers. It will work. Keep in mind that Excel date system is numeric, but you can format that number to be displayed in many different ways. If a cell contains a text string, excel will return an error. Cheers, Catalin. Under this settings I was unable to convert dates in text format like Jan, Apr, Aug, and Dec to date format; since their initials are different in Spanish Ene, Abr, Ago, and Dic , or it is my thought.
I tried all the tips you listed, but none worked. Any idea what else I can do to get the conversion? Hi, Please upload a sample file with bexamples of your data to our Help Desk or by mail to: catalin myonlinetraininghub.
And i am very much thankful that I found this site that is very helpful in learning ms office especially excel and word. Hi all. I am looking for some help. Sorry guys, but I am pretty new on Excel. Thanks in advance. Otherwise it sees the formula and not the value. You got it right Jose, you cannot split the result of a formula, just plain text. I have another problem though.. Apr is formatted as text when i copy my data into excel.. My challange is i have data stored as text in multiple sheets and i want to find easy way to convert this data to numbers at the same time instead of opening them sheet after sheet.
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