editing non-numeric data so Excel will recognize it as a Date

[splendid61]

I have used Excel , but have never really used Macros. I have a situation where I think a simple Macro could be useful. I have tried playing around with the built-in Macro Recorder, but I don't really know how to use that tool.

The situation:
In my worksheet, there is a Column that has 3000+ Rows of dates listed in the format "Jan. 4, 2003" ...however, because of that pesky period, Excel doesn't recognize this data as a date. So I can't use the data for calculations until I delete the period for each one, which gives me "Jan 4, 2003" ...a format that Excel does recognize as a date. I would prefer not to do that manually 3000+ times. Would a Macro be able to do that for me? Or is there a function or combination of functions that I can use to remove the periods?

Currently:
Jan. 15, 2003
Jan. 13, 2003
Jan. 13, 2003
Jan. 7, 2003
Jan. 4, 2003
Dec. 28, 2002
Dec. 28, 2002
Dec. 27, 2002

Goal:
Jan 15, 2003
Jan 13, 2003
Jan 13, 2003
Jan 7, 2003
Jan 4, 2003
Dec 28, 2002
Dec 28, 2002
Dec 27, 2002

[lecxe]

Hi splendid61

You can do it directly in the worksheet:

- select the column
- format the column as
mmm d, yyyy
- use text to columns, delimited, choose no delimiters in the second panel, in the third panel choose data format: Date MDY. Excel will convert the strings to date regardless of the period.

[splendid61]

lecxe,

That worked perfectly. Thanks for the detailed instructions. Saved me a lot of time.