Force cell entry strictly to mm/dd/yyyy

O

odonnell

New Member
Joined
Mar 11, 2015
Messages
12
Using Excel 2007, and I want to force entry to calls in a date column to the format mm/dd/yyyy. Currently I have the cells formatted for mm/dd/yyyy and entered data validation date range between 12/31/1999 and 12/31/2060. However some users are too lazy to look up the day case start and just enter 05/03 (mm/yy) and data validation allows this, then excel formats the date as 05/03/2015.</SPAN>
I don’t want to use a macro as macros will be disabled by default and they wont enable it.
I tried to make data validation = text length 10 however it has issues with the ‘/’</SPAN>
Is it possible to make the data validation mm/dd/yyyy and strictly not accept anything else?</SPAN>
thanks guys</SPAN>
 

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=if(len(A1)<10,"oops you seem to have entered the date to the wrong format","")
 
Upvote 0
Without VBA, it's not going to be easy.

Basically what happens is the 05/03 is converted to the date 05/01/2015 before data validation even looks at it.
This is why the Len=10 rule doesn't work.
Because the real value of a date is a serial number, incrimenting by 1 since Jan 1 1900.
So 3/11/2015 = 42074
LEN(42074) = 5

The only solution I can imagine (without VBA) is to format the entry cells as TEXT.
Then you can use the LEN = 10 rule.

Side effect is that any formulas that refer to them will no longer consider them dates, they'll be text strings..
You'd have to have a helper column to do =A1+0 to convert them to dates for your other formulas to refer to.


But even this is still not fool-proof.
It will not tell the difference between a date entered as mm/dd/yyyy and a date entered as dd/mm/yyyy
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0
Or create 3 cells with data validation "lists" 1 for days, 1 for months, 1 for years, then use =date(c1,b1,a1)
 
Upvote 0
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Upvote 0
Maybe long winded but set the lists by month!
Someone is bound to enter 31/2/2015
Which would return 3/3/2015 (I think)
 
Upvote 0
Thanks guys, some good ways I never thought about. Will test all out and see what works.
Cant beleive i didnt think about the list option! doh!
 
Upvote 0
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