
That said, my solution is fairly simple (and especially so in this case as the “strange” date format is uniform in each cell in column A). And so, we deal with some date format Excel does not recognize several times a day! Your post has made me even more jealous that we don’t have a newer version of Excel at our disposal! I actually run into this issue fairly often, as much of our data is pulled from various database sources and dumped into MySQL, Access or ftp’d as a CSV, TAB or TXT file. Unfortunately, we are stuck on Excel 2007 at my work. I will create a follow-up video with some of the most common responses. There are NO wrong answers here, and this will be a great opportunity to learn from everyone, so don't be afraid to share your answer. Please leave a comment below with the technique you would use. There are many ways to go about this challenge in Excel, and I want to know how you would solve it.
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I also have an article on how to get the day name for a date How Would You Convert This Text to a Date? See the video above for details.Ĭheckout my article and video on how dates work in Excel to learn more about how dates are numbers formatted as dates. If you see a number like 42808.80, then you can change the number format to view it as a date and time. We can do with a formula in column E that sums the date and time value from B2 & C2.Įxcel should automatically change the number format to a date & time format.

Excel automatically recognizes this as a time value. Double-click cell A2 to edit it, select the text for the time, and copy it.We can use the same technique to extract the Time into column C. Flash Fill will find the date in each cell in column A and fill it down column B.Ĭheckout the video above to see it in action.The keyboard shortcut for Flash Fill is Ctrl+ E. Click the Flash Fill button on the data tab of the Ribbon.In the example in the video I typed the following into the cell: Mar 14, 2017 Type the date that is in the cell and press Enter.If the adjacent cell isn't blank, insert a blank column or copy the column to a blank sheet. Select a blank cell to the right of the cell that contains the date stored as text.Here's how to use Flash Fill to extract the date and time out of each cell: Flash Fill was introduced in Excel 2013 for Windows, and it's a really handy tool for data cleansing tasks. One simple way is to use the new Flash Fill feature. There are several ways to solve this problem, and I'm looking forward to seeing your solution in the comments below.

Our challenge is to convert the text to a date value. If you have some text at the bottom of the grouped dates, then those values will need to be converted to dates to use all the grouping features of a pivot table. The column for the filter list on the right contains dates, and the date values in the filter list are grouped into Year, Month, Day, Minute, Hour, Second. In the image below you can see the filter list on the left is all text values. Method #2: Filter Drop-down MenuĪnother way to see the data type is by using the filter drop-down menu. This is a very important concept that will help you cleanse your data and work with dates. The image below shows what we will see if the value is stored as Text.Īnd here is an image of the cell value that is recognized as a date.Ĭheckout my article and video on Dates in Excel to learn more.
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You can also download the example file above. Here is the text for the date that you can copy/paste to Excel. Therefore, he cannot sort the column or use it with the date grouping feature of a pivot table.

Excel does not recognize these cells as a date data type. He has a data set exported from a system that contains a column with a date & time. Mark, a member of The Pivot Ready Course, had a great question about converting text to dates. Text-to-Date-Challenge-Live-Training.zip Download Data Cleansing Challenge
