You get a CSV file from an International branch of your company and the dates are in M/D/Y when you use D/M/Y or vice versa. There is an easy solution. Episode 947 shows you how.
This video is the podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel 97-2007 from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 377 tips from the book!
This video is the podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel 97-2007 from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 377 tips from the book!
Transcript of the video:
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast. I'm Bill Jelen.
Basically we start out with massive amounts of data.
So how are we going to analyze, as well plus fire up a pivot table.
Lets see if you can solve this problem.
Hey, Welcome back to the MrExcel netcast. I'm Bill Jelen.
Today a question about CSV files that have dates in the other format.
So whether you use day month year or month day year.
Someone from another subsidiary and other country sent you as CSV file and the dates are in the wrong format.
So for me since I'm here in the united states, the wrong format is day month year.
If you're somewhere else, just pretend it's reversed.
So we have Podcast947.csv.
If I would open that in excel.
It automatically imports it using default settings and those dates are not real dates.
If I try and format this you'll see that unless it happened that the date that was less than a month.
You know we do not have real dates that are formatable let's say or that we can creat calculations from.
[ Inaudiable ] in but those are all wrong.
Real pain, well the person who sent in this question said, you know, hey is it possible to change the international settings before you open this and have it open correctly and so forth, hey really, I think that's not the right way to go.
The faster way to go is just come back here at a "Windows explorer" and Find your file.
Rename the file to a text file.
When you have a CSV, microsoft just kind of takes control and they say, hey, we're going to use all the default settings.
But instead if you use excel to open a text file, it will then take you through the wizard and in the wizard, in step 3, we can declare what type of a date we have.
So here I'm going to say that my day is in day month year and click finish, and then it all gets imported correctly.
Boy, that's a great little dialog box really handy to solve this problem without changing your international settings.
The trick is you have to change it from a csv file because you have a csv file, you're never going to get to go through that dialogue.
They're just going to use their defaults, which in this case don't work at all.
Well there you have it.
Thanks for stopping by and we'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Thanks, you starfire. We'll see you next time for another Deck hands Mr.. Itself you
Basically we start out with massive amounts of data.
So how are we going to analyze, as well plus fire up a pivot table.
Lets see if you can solve this problem.
Hey, Welcome back to the MrExcel netcast. I'm Bill Jelen.
Today a question about CSV files that have dates in the other format.
So whether you use day month year or month day year.
Someone from another subsidiary and other country sent you as CSV file and the dates are in the wrong format.
So for me since I'm here in the united states, the wrong format is day month year.
If you're somewhere else, just pretend it's reversed.
So we have Podcast947.csv.
If I would open that in excel.
It automatically imports it using default settings and those dates are not real dates.
If I try and format this you'll see that unless it happened that the date that was less than a month.
You know we do not have real dates that are formatable let's say or that we can creat calculations from.
[ Inaudiable ] in but those are all wrong.
Real pain, well the person who sent in this question said, you know, hey is it possible to change the international settings before you open this and have it open correctly and so forth, hey really, I think that's not the right way to go.
The faster way to go is just come back here at a "Windows explorer" and Find your file.
Rename the file to a text file.
When you have a CSV, microsoft just kind of takes control and they say, hey, we're going to use all the default settings.
But instead if you use excel to open a text file, it will then take you through the wizard and in the wizard, in step 3, we can declare what type of a date we have.
So here I'm going to say that my day is in day month year and click finish, and then it all gets imported correctly.
Boy, that's a great little dialog box really handy to solve this problem without changing your international settings.
The trick is you have to change it from a csv file because you have a csv file, you're never going to get to go through that dialogue.
They're just going to use their defaults, which in this case don't work at all.
Well there you have it.
Thanks for stopping by and we'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Thanks, you starfire. We'll see you next time for another Deck hands Mr.. Itself you
