How to display only the month when given date value

[gmatoka]

What's the easiest and quickest way to display only the month portion of a date string? E.g., if I have 1/01/2013 in cell A1, how do I display only "January" in cell B1 based on A1's content? The MONTH() function will return a serial number for January, but not the text. I could write a short VBA code macro to parse the number and display the text, but that seems like over kill. Surely there's some Excel function that can do this instead?

[benishiryo]

hi gmatoka. try:
=TEXT(A1,"mmm")

or:
=A1
format cells to custom:
mmm

[BenMiller]

If you copy the information (or with a formula, like =A1) into column B and right-click>format cells>custom format and type mmm it will display Jan, Feb, etc. You can play around with the preset date formats to get what you want too.

[gmatoka]

Thanks, you guys are great!

[Tony Valko]

=TEXT(A1,"mmm") returns the short month name Jan

=TEXT(A1,"mmmm") returns the long month name January

In some international locations the format codes can be different so you should be aware of that if distributing files to other countries.