mixed up usa and uk date formats

Posted by andrew cobb on September 01, 2001 2:48 AM

I'm looking at how long patients stay in hospital.. data has been entered so that "2/11/97" could be 2nd November or 11th February. These dates appear left aligned. Does this mean that dates have been entered as text, or can this be retrieved?

Posted by Dax on September 01, 2001 3:04 AM

More than likely, yes. Select a single cell and try and format it using Ctrl+Shift+1. If the date changes to a number you know that the cell is formatted as date. If not then it's text. You can convert the text using the DATEVALUE function in Excel.

HTH,
Dax.