{"id":5665,"date":"2017-03-25T21:29:54","date_gmt":"2017-03-26T04:29:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/?p=5665"},"modified":"2017-03-25T21:30:36","modified_gmt":"2017-03-26T04:30:36","slug":"i-always-forget-how-to-convert-simple-text-strings-into-dates-in-excel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/archives\/5665","title":{"rendered":"I always forget how to convert simple text strings into dates in Excel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite having the world’s knowledge at my finger tips (i.e. the internet), I always forget little tips on how to do things in Excel. Yes, there’s bookmarks and other different ways to save websites, but I can never find them again after I saved them! So maybe writing a blog about it might be a good way to remember and also to help other people out there who come across this same problem.<\/p>\n

This is one of the most annoying things when working with text and numbers in Excel… getting text to be in a “date” format. It makes life a whole lot easier when running queries or trying to sort\/filter\/order numerical values rather than text. While there are a lot of ways to do it (see this link for example<\/a>), the following method is the most straight-forward way for me to convert text into a date\/number and it works every time.<\/p>\n

So here goes…<\/p>\n

You come across dates as a string of text and they look like this:<\/p>\n