convert american dates from a query

Hi,

I checked past post about date conversions but couldn't find any that
fix my problem:

- I am doing a query that returns dates (text strings) in the format 1
Dec 2005, and I need to convert them to the user short date format.

Problem is that the xl of those users does not understand "Dec". As
there are "built in" functions that only works in the American format I
was expecting this was going to be an easy one... but so far no
success. Ideas

Mika

What dates are recognized by the local Excel settings? I would guess that
the big obstacle would be the month names/abbreviations. Perhaps you need to
convert them to strings, then use a lookup table to replace the month names
with the localized equivalents, then do the conversion using the DATEVALUE
function. Just a thought as I have no way to test it.
--
- K Dales


"Mika" wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I checked past post about date conversions but couldn't find any that
> fix my problem:
>
> - I am doing a query that returns dates (text strings) in the format 1
> Dec 2005, and I need to convert them to the user short date format.
>
> Problem is that the xl of those users does not understand "Dec". As
> there are "built in" functions that only works in the American format I
> was expecting this was going to be an easy one... but so far no
> success. Ideas
>
> Mika
>
>

Sorrowfully I think you are right Dales. I think that is what I should
do. I was trying to avoid it, in case such a function was already
developed. It is amazing that different Excel language versions can not
understand each other. The minimum I would expect is that any version
has functions, like val(...), that always/only work with english and
then, trough format, could give outputs in the local language,
something like:

Mylocal_date=Format(ValFunction("3 Dec 2005"),"short date")

Mika

Sorrowfully I think you are right Dales. I think that is what I should
do. I was trying to avoid it, in case such a function was already
developed. It is amazing that different Excel language versions can not
understand each other. The minimum I would expect is that any version
has functions, like val(...), that always/only work with english and
then, trough format, could give outputs in the local language,
something like:

Mylocal_date=Format(ValFunction("3 Dec 2005"),"short date")

Mika