I've gotten an Excel file in which some of the dates are actually serial dates (42741, 42800, etc.), and some are just text. Since the serial dates are formatted as dates, they all look alike, but Excel can't correctly sort them, and displays them as spanning a year instead of the two month period they actually represent.
To make things worse, the dates are formatted in the US style (mm/dd/yyyy), and my system uses the International (dd/mm/yyyy).
How do I clean this data!?
lets pretend your dates are in Column A place the following in an adjacent column and copy down accordingly.
=IF(ISNUMBER(A2),L7,DATE(RIGHT(A2,4),LEFT(A2,2),MID(A2,FIND("/",A2)+1,2)))
Alternative use TEXT to Column built in function in the ribbon.
1) Select your range of mixed dates
2) Select Text-to-Columns
3) Keep selecting next until you come to the page after selecting delimiters
4) Choose your destination location (default is overnighting your data)
5) Select the column header in the preview
6) Select the Date radio button for format
7) Select the date format that matches the source format
Serial dates will remain unchanged, and text dates will be converted.
After much grief, this is the method that worked for me. I hope it might help others!
Add a length column, containing =LEN(your date). The serial dates will have 5 characters, while the text ones will have 7. Sort by length.
Filter for the 5-length (serial) dates, and copy them to an adjacent
column.
Use the text-to-column feature on these cells. Separate by
delimited, under delimiters choose other, and type "/" (or ".", if
relevant). Hit finish.
In an adjacent column, use the DATE function to reconstitute your
date, month, year pairs into a date. (Note that if your year just
says, say, "17", Excel will assume it to be 1917, so either add the
leading "20" or hard-code it.)
Now, do a similar process with your 7-digit dates - copy them, split
by "/", (or "."), recombine into dates.
Copy your new dates back to their original slots and format them as
"Short date". Et voilà! Excel now recognises them as dates. You can
sort and filter by actual date.
Related
I have date column on two different sheets and when I run a match function (part of index match) it comes up N/A, because Excel says the two cells that have the same date in them are not equal to each other. When I change the format of one of the columns it changes to five numbers (which I know that is what excel uses to track dates), but the other column does not do this, it is simply text.
My question is, how to I get excel to forget about the five number date format and just give me text? Paste special values doesn't get it done like I thought it would.
I would say that you basically have two options: either convert both to text, or convert both to dates. If you want the text, the easiest way to convert them to text is via text to columns:
Select the column with the date (the one that turns to a 5 digit number when formatted to number or general) and select Text to Columns:
Click on next twice and select Text, then finish:
And that should do it.
I'll mention the other method, just in case, because in my experience, it's more often more practical to get the dates as actual dates in excel rather than text, especially when one wants to perform calculation on them or allow for different date formats.
The other method involves inserting 1 somewhere and copying it. Then select the set of dates that is plain text:
Use the paste special function and select 'Multiply' under the operations section:
All the dates normally should turn into those 5 digit numbers (if they were originally formatted as general for example). You simply then need to format them as date with the appropriate format, and your index/match should be fine matching the two date columns.
Excel will struggle to compare text (date as text) with numbers (date as an integer).
My suggestion is to convert the text into a 'proper' date. This is a good habit. When excel recognises something as a date it will store it as that 5-digit integer, but can display it however you choose (format cells to see the options)
So create a column next to your 'text dates'. Fill it with a formula which will create a 'proper' date, using the existing text.
If your text is in A1, then put this in B1. Assuming your data is dd/mm/yyyy
=date(right(a1,4),mid(a1,4,2),left(a1,2))
This is just saying that:
Year = rightmost 4 characters
Month= middle 2 digits (start at character 4 and grab 2 digits)
Day = leftmost 2 digits.
I assume you are using normal dates, and not the abomination that is USA format dates. But if your text is in USA data format then just swap the month and day parameters. Likewise if your text dates are 2 digits just tweak the 'year' parameter.
Check it works as expected, then copy down the column. You can now use column B for your vlookup or index match.
nb Jerry's answer is excellent and should work. I added the above because it tells you a little about how to directly work with dates. Good luck.
So I have a pretty long column with name dates and hours, like this:
14/01/2017 03:30
(They are DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM)
I need to get the month number and show it as text, like January, February, and so on.
If I format the destination cell as 'MMM' all the column cells show January even if the given month is 2, 3, or let's say 12. I also tried the formula =TEXT(L2,"mmmm") (since the given info come from column F.
Any ideas?
sounds like your date and time are stored as text and not in excels serial date format. You can test this by changing the format of the cell to general and seeing if anything happens if nothing changes then its text. another way would be to use the formula =istext(A1) where A1 is a cell with a date in it.
Now ASSUMING you do have dates in text format, I would suggest converting them to excels date serial. There are numerous ways of doing this. I will show you one way.
This will strip each component of the text out and then recombine it. We will assume your date in is A1
Strip out the year
=MID(A1,7,4)
Strip out the month
=MID(A1,4,2)
Strip out the day
=LEFT(A1,2)
Now to recombine it:
=DATE(MID(A1,7,4),MID(A1,4,2),LEFT(A1,2))
That will give you the date in an integer format that excel can then turn around and display as needed.
In order not to lose the time component you should strip that part off as well and combine it with the date. Remember the date is an integer, and the time is everything after the decimal. Think of time as a fraction of a day.
To get time out use:
=RIGHT(A1,5)
and to convert it to excel time:
=TIMEVALUE(RIGHT(A1,5))
and to get the two together, simply add:
=DATE(MID(A1,7,4),MID(A1,4,2),LEFT(A1,2)+TIMEVALUE(RIGHT(A1,5))
The key part to this whole thing is you will need to format that cell to display what you want. you can either choose a preformatted style from the drop down menu, or you can apply custom formatting. Setting the custom format to MMMM should display just the full name of the month.
IF you actually need the text of the month and not just the format, then you could use the formula from your question:
=TEXT(<insert appropriate formula from above>,"mmmm")
Try using MID to get the month only, then TEXT():
=TEXT(MID(A1,SEARCH("/",A1)+1,2),"MMMM")
I'm using an application called Kroll OnTrack to manage a review of documents as part of a litigation project. Kroll can export the metadata for these files into an XLS file. The problem is that when Kroll exports the dates for these documents, it seems to do so as a string, and the dates are being exported in MM/DD/YYYY format, so when I go to sort by date, the documents line up in this order:
01/01/2005
02/02/2005
03/05/2010
04/07/2006
05/03/2007
...and so on.
I need to be able to sort the table by date so we can put together a chronology of these documents. Trying to force Excel to re-format as a date doesn't seem to work, nor have I had any luck using DATEVALUE(). Right now, I'm doing text-to-columns then re-concatenating the dates, which seems to work, but is there a more elegant/efficient solution for this issue?
Perform Text-to-Columns on that column of dates but with some optional commands.
On the first screen of the T2C wizard, choose Fixed Width and click Next.
On the second page of the wizard, discard any border that Excel added by dragging them up out of the Data Preview window. It is very likely that none will be there. Click Next.
On the third page of the wizard, choose Column data format, Date and MDY from the drop-down selector beside Date.
Click Finish.
You should be left with real dates in the column. This procedure is easily recorded for future use.
In a column adjacent to your text dates, you could try something like this
DATE(RIGHT(E3,4),LEFT(E3,2),MID(E3,4,2))
Then copy down and sort/filter on this column of real dates.
Where cell E3 contains you text-date. You could also follow up with Text(...,"yyyy-mm-dd") or some other date format, if you need the date in a specific format.
The formula assumes that the text string contained in cell E3 is of length 10 (i.e. all white space is trimmed and padded zeros for day and month are used). If this is not the case, the forumula is easily amended.
I have a csv that contains a list of dates, once imported into Excel they are in 2 different formats. How can I get them all in the same format?
Example:
01/23/2012
01/26/2012
40910
41031
You probably have a BIG issue with your file!
Probably, Excel is recognizing dates as "dd/mm/yyyy" but your data is "mm/dd/yyyy" formatted.
So, your numbers are really dates (just format, as #t.thielemans suggested). But are incorrectly parsed - month and day are switched!
Solution (assuming your dates are on A:A column):
To convert text to date:
=DATE(RIGHT(A1;4);LEFT(A1;2);MID(A1;4;2))
To correct day/month:
=DATE(YEAR(A1);DAY(A1);MONTH(A1))
Detect whether cell has date (dates are numbers, in Excel) or text:
=ISNUMBER(A1)
Finally, all combined within one formula:
=IF(ISNUMBER(A1);DATE(YEAR(A1);DAY(A1);MONTH(A1));DATE(RIGHT(A1;4);LEFT(A1;2);MID(A1;4;2)))
Just drag last formula from first row to end of your data and then format it as you wish (see #t.thielemans solution).
Select your data column and make sure they're highlighted. Go to Home>Number and select Custom and enter mm/dd/yyyy. You can also change the layout to one you want (mm-dd-yyyy/mmddyyyy/dd-mm-yyyy/...)
I have been given an excel file with dates in a column for about 17000 rows. The problem here is that the dates are not reliable and the cells have varying formats. Some are formatted as plain text, some are in the "general" format, yet others are in one of several available date formats. In one case, I even found a date in a cell formatted as mm/dd/yyyy yet the date is showing up as 20/05/1989.
The only thing consistent about the dates is that they are actually date-first and month-second to the human reader, irrespective of whatever the format of the cell is. Another things is that the date separator isn't consistently used, some dates have the hyphen, some have the slash and yet others use the dot as the separator.
I intend to add another column next to the column with the dates, and have this column formatted as pure text. Now if I use the formula =TEXT() then this would of course give me the serial (excel) date.
Is there a way to get these dates as text, using VBA if necessary?
If I understand you correctly, you want to get a text version of what is displayed in the Excel sheet. Easy way to do this is save the sheet (or just the column in another sheet) as a Formatted Text (Space delimited)(*.prn) file. When you reopen the file, it will be treated as an importable text file.
Please try this formula across and advice.
=DAY(A1)&"-"&MONTH(A1)&"-"&YEAR(A1)
Regards
Shiva