Saturday, February 26, 2011

Cannot format my dates in Excel

Question:
I have a worksheet containing hundreds of rows of data whereby no matter how I tried formatting the “date” (Column D), it still does not shows in ascending or descending sequence but instead it sort by the 1st  2-digits of the data.

Answer:
The date column is actually not presenting the dates in the right format. They are text formatted probably because your computer is accepting dates with dd/mm/yy format while the dates in your worksheet is in mm/dd/yy. Or it could be the other way round. To resolve this, the fastest way is to use

Data > Text to Columns > Next > Next > Date Format (Select “Date”)” and choose the right date format (dd/mm/yy) for your dates.

After the conversion, you will be able to format the dates in any format you prefer.

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