How do I change date format without losing data?

I have a an Excel worksheet that has about 3,500 birthdates entered. The
format is if the person was born on january1st of 1960, it would look like
this: 19600101.
The program I use to calculate my work needs these formatted in the
traditional 01/01/1960. How do I get the whole column to change that format?
I really do not want to retype the whole thing.


PS -- The cell format is number, (-1234) according to Excel...

Select the column. Choose Data/Text to Columns. Click Next, Next, then
select the YMD item in the Date dropdown (assuming that your current
format is YYYYMMDD - your example is ambiguous). Click Finish.


In article <[email protected]>,
ScottNovo <[email protected]> wrote:

> I have a an Excel worksheet that has about 3,500 birthdates entered. The
> format is if the person was born on january1st of 1960, it would look like
> this: 19600101.
> The program I use to calculate my work needs these formatted in the
> traditional 01/01/1960. How do I get the whole column to change that format?
> I really do not want to retype the whole thing.

Absolutely phenomenal! Thanks for your help. You have no idea how much time
and frustration you saved me.

"JE McGimpsey" wrote:

> Select the column. Choose Data/Text to Columns. Click Next, Next, then
> select the YMD item in the Date dropdown (assuming that your current
> format is YYYYMMDD - your example is ambiguous). Click Finish.
>
>
> In article <[email protected]>,
> ScottNovo <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > I have a an Excel worksheet that has about 3,500 birthdates entered. The
> > format is if the person was born on january1st of 1960, it would look like
> > this: 19600101.
> > The program I use to calculate my work needs these formatted in the
> > traditional 01/01/1960. How do I get the whole column to change that format?
> > I really do not want to retype the whole thing.
>