Date formatting

**brittanyanne17** · 05-04-2009, 04:59 PM

I have an Excel spreadsheet that has dates on it. I need to format it to show the dates as mm/dd/yyyy so that I can import it into another program. When I highlight the columns and format them to mm/dd/yyyy it doesn't change anything. Is there anything I can do to fix this?

**teylyn** · 05-04-2009, 05:06 PM

Hi,

is the data in the cells really numeric? Could be that they are text and thus don't respond to date format settings. Post a sample, so we can have a look.

cheers

**brittanyanne17** · 05-04-2009, 05:43 PM

I'm not sure how to post a sample and I don't have access to the document right now. Suppose it was originally formatted as text, is there a way to change it now?

**oldchippy** · 05-04-2009, 05:57 PM

Hi,

Type a 1 in an empty cell (make sure the cell is formatted to General), copy it, select the "date" cells, Paste Special > Multipy. That should format them to numbers, then format those cells to DATE