How To Change European Dates To Us In Excel

If you lot work in more than i language with Excel, then you probably accept noticed that you have problems converting dates from the European format (dd/mm/yyyy) to the American English format (mm/dd/yyyy). In fact, in almost countries exterior the US, the date is written as dd/mm/yyyy. (i.e., The day is first, the month is next, and the yr is at the cease.) If you download a document from your banking company or if someone sends you an electronic mail with a spreadsheet in TXT, HTML, or CVS format, the dates will be backwards when y'all import it into the English language of Excel. You would have the same problem going from Usa English to another Latin-based language. Fortunately, converting the engagement format dd/mm/yyyy to mm/dd/yyyy is unproblematic. Read on to notice out how.

If you installed Microsoft Excel 2013 USA English version, when you lot open a file store in European or Latin American formats, Excel will not recognize the dates. Therefore, you lot could not use a engagement format. You could not convert, for case, 01/10/2014 to x Oct 2014. If someone sent you lot a document that is already saved in spreadsheet format, you will non accept whatever trouble going from i language to another.

Here is an example. The spreadsheet beneath was downloaded in HTML format from a Castilian banking company website. The dates are written in dd/mm/yyyy format.

ane.The way to change this is to take the string of text, for instance, 01/x/2014 and convert it to 10/01/2014. And then plug that into the Date() function in Excel.

Even Excel is complaining about this example. It tells you that it has stored the text as a number (Excel considers dates every bit numbers.).

excel convert dates

ii.To fix this, utilize the LEFT, MID, RIGHT, and Engagement functions:

LEFT—This takes the characters from the left. Below we wrote =LEFT(B16,2), meaning take the first two letters from the appointment located at cell B16.

MID—Here you tell it where to start to take letters from the centre. Then =MID(B16,four,2) ways commencement at position 4 and so take the two characters there. You lot start at 4 because the commencement 3 characters are the date and the slash (/).

RIGHT—This is the contrary of left. Here =Right(B16,four) means we tell it to take the last four characters. The instance below shows the formula and the end upshot.

Annotation that you could have written the formula all in one cell, but it would he harder to read. However, doing that saves you from using upwardly a whole column for each individual footstep in the formula.

excel convert dates

3.Now, you can work with the date like y'all would want, doing things like sorting the data by date and doing appointment math (e.g., adding 1 to the engagement to get the next day and formatting it it to say "October 1, 2014").