It’s not uncommon for database programs to export data in a text format. I downloaded some data from a web browser, and ended up with Dates that Excel didn’t recognize as Dates, but rather a Text string.
In a previous post I used the Text to Columns feature to extract and convert the Month and Day into a Date Format. Excel used the computer’s System Date to supply the Year. Since all the data happened to be for 2010 there was no problem.
Had there been data from any year other than 2010, the Month and Day wouldn’t have been sufficient to give the correct Date. Hence a formula is a better way to extract the Date, in this instance.
It was a simple matter for me to quickly put together a formula to do just that, but there are several parts to the formula, none of which I’ve covered in this blog. I really don’ t want this post to drag on to infinity and beyond 🙂 so I’m going to break the formula down in the next several posts and cover the following:
- MID Function
- RIGHT Function
- CONCATENATE Function and Ampersand
- TYPE Function
- VALUE Function and Double Negation
So I guess this is the first part of a series to Extract a Date from Text in Excel.
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