How to work with dates as Strings

Hello,

I have a data extract that is being pushed out of a system with Dates as VarChar's so excel naturally doesn't see them as dates. Meaning I cannot make use of them in some of my normal reports as the formula's do not reckognise them as dates.

the format I get is recognisable as a date - 05-04-2017 but of course it isn't. If I change the formatting in any way from 'General' in Excel, it remains unaltered.

Is there any formula I could run against it to convert it into a recognised date format?

The system the data extract comes out of cannot be changed, so I am stuck with dates in String format.

Any help would be great.

You have a couple of options. I would try this first:

Highlight the column > Data > Text to Columns > Next > Next > Date: DMY (assuming that date is April 5th and not May 4th) > Finish.

Your text dates should now be actual Excel recognizable dates.

If that didn't do it, I recommend uploading a small representative sample of the workbook for us to test on.

@63falcondude

Your a star. That has done the trick.

Thanks

Great, happy to help. Thanks for the rep!