How to Convert Text to Date Format in Excel?

Excel is used to store large amounts of data for manipulation or computation purposes. If our spreadsheet contains the date in text format and we try to apply some formula to it for some analysis will throw some errors. We can easily identify the format of the mentioned date by looking at the alignment of data, if data is left aligned then it is in text format, and if it’s right aligned then it’s in date format. Changing their format text to date one by one would take lots of time as spreadsheets contain large amounts of data. So, in this article, we will see some approaches to convert Text to Date format in Excel. 

Approach 1:

Step 1: Open the spreadsheet in Excel and select the cells which have the date in text format then go to home tab at top of the ribbon and then select replace from the find & select dropdown.

Step 2: Enter “-” in find what and “/” in replace with and press replace all.

Step 3: Finally, our spreadsheet has changed the date text in the Date format.

Approach 2:

Step 1: Open the spreadsheet with excel and select all data cells of one column and select the data tab in the top of the ribbon and then choose Texts to Columns from data tools. Then Convert Text to column wizard dialog box will appear and here you can see it is in Step 1 of 3 that is written in the dialog box.

Step 2: Just click NEXT in step 1 and step 2 as it is and in step 3 select the Date from the column data format and press finish.

Step 3: Similarly, select all data cells of another column and apply the above step to get the final result in date format.

Now you will understand how we change the date text in Date format.