Change the date format in Excel

If you require displaying the date like this 2-Feb-2010 or August 1, 2015 etc. while entering dates you may change the settings in Excel easily.

If you are storing dates in Excel worksheets, the default format picked by the Excel is the format set in Control Panel. So, if your control panel setting is “M/d/yyyy”, the Excel will format the 2nd Feb 2010 date as follows:

2/2/2010

If you require displaying the date like 2-Feb-2010 or August 1, 2015, etc. as entering dates you may change the settings in Excel easily.

In case you require permanently changing the date format that applies to current as well as future work in Excel,  you should change this in the control panel.

If you try entering a date like this: 20/2/2010 then Excel will take it as text because you provided day first for the default M/d/yyyy format.

For the current worksheet, you may set the date formatting in different ways as described in the following section with examples.

Related Learning: Add / Subtract Dates in Excel

First Way: Change the date format by “Format Cell” option

The first way I am going to show you for changing the date format in Excel is using the “Format Cells” option. Follow these steps:

Step 1:

Right click on a cell or multiple cells where you require changing the date format. For the demo, I have entered a few dates and selected all:

Excel format cells

Click the “Format Cells” option that should open the Format Cells dialog. You may also press the Ctrl+1 for opening this dialog in Windows. For Mac, the short key is Control+1 or Command+1.

Step 2:

In the Format Cells dialog, the Number tab should be pre-selected. If not, press Number tab. Under the Category, select Date. Towards the right side, you can see Type.

Excel format cells dialog

For the demo, I have selected 14-Mar-01 format and press OK. The resultant sheet after modifying date format is:

Excel change date format

You are done!

Also see: VBA date today

An example of Mon-year format

The following example displays the dates in Mon-Year format e.g. Oct-92. For that, open the “Format Cells” dialog again –> Number –> Date and select Mar-01 format.

The above sheet displays the same dates as shown below:

date format mon year

Similarly, you may choose any date format as per the requirement of your scenario.

Interesting Topic: How to calculate age in Excel

Change date format by locale/location

If you wish to display the dates based on other languages then you may use the Locale (location) option in the “Format Cells” dialog.

See the following Excel sheet where I set the Arabic(UAE) option and one of its type:

date format Arabic

The resultant sheet for the same dates as in the above examples:

date format Arabic 2

Similarly, you may choose the following locale:

  • Bashkir (Russia)
  • Chinese (Simplified, Singapore)
  • Corsican (France)
  • Danish (Denmark)
  • Various options for English
  • Hindi (India)
  • Japanese (Japan)
  • And many more

Customizing the date format

By using the date formatting codes, you may customize the dates in a flexible way. For example, displaying the short month name (Jan, Feb) by using “mmm” or full month name by “mmmm”.

Similarly, showing the day names of the Week (Sun, Mon) by ddd or full names (Sunday, Monday) by dddd formatting code.

First, have look at an example of customizing the date which is followed by the list of date formatting codes.

Select and right click on date cells that you want to customize and go to “Format Cells”. Under the Number –> Category, select Date and choose the closest format you wish to display e.g. “Mar 14, 2001”.

Under the Category, press Custom now and towards the right side, you should see Type with various options. Either choose a format from the available list or enter the formatting code as required in the text box under Type.

date format custom

For the example, I entered the “[$-409]mmmm dddd, d , yyyy;@” and see the resultant sheet:

date format custom 2

List of formatting codes in Excel

Following is the formatting code list that you may use to customize the dates:

Day Codes

  • d – for the day as 1-31
  • dd – for the day as 01-31
  • ddd – Sun, Mon, Tue
  • dddd – Sunday, Monday, Tuesday etc.

Month Codes

  • m – for Months as 1-12
  • mm – 01-12
  • mmm – Apr, May, Jun etc.
  • mmmm – April, May, June, July etc.
  • mmmmm – Month as the first letter of the month

Year Codes

  • yy – 00-99
  • yyyy – 2000, 2002, 2010 etc.

You may also want to learn: Convert Number and Date to Text

Quick way of displaying dates in default short and long formats

If you need to display dates in the short or long format with default settings, you may do it by following this:

Select the dates you wish to format in short/long date formats. For that, I chose the above example dates that were formatted in the custom format (see the last graphic):

Now, go to the Home tab and in the Number group, click the Number Format box as shown below:

quick date formatting

Press the Short Date or Long Date format.

Changing date format in Excel by TEXT function

The Excel TEXT function can also be used for formatting dates. The TEXT function takes two arguments as shown below:

=TEXT(Value to convert into text, “Formatting code “)

Where the first argument can be a date cell, a number etc.

The second argument should sound familiar now; the formatting code that we just learned.

The TEXT function for formatting dates can particularly be useful if you want to keep the original date column in place and displaying another date-set based on those dates.

An example of Full month, day and year formatting example

For the example, the A column cells are assigned the Date of Birth dates in default format (US English) i.e. M/d/yyyy.

The corresponding B cells will display the dates in full month name, day and year in four digits format.

The TEXT formula:

The resultant sheet with formatted dates:

Excel format date TEXT

I have written the formula in the B2 cell only and copied to B6 cell as follows.

After you get the result in B2 cell by writing the above formula, bring the mouse over the right bottom of the B2 cell. As + sign appears with solid line, drag the handle till B6 and formula should be copied to other cells. The Excel will update the corresponding A cells with respect to B cells automatically.

How to use the DATEDIF function in Excel

Formatting dates in d, mmm, yy by TEXT function

The following example displays the dates in day with leading zero (01-12), short month name and year in two-digit format.

The TEXT formula:

The resultant sheet:

format date dd mmm yy

Displaying the day name as well

See the example below where day name (Sunday, Monday etc.) is also displayed along with day without leading zero, full month name and year in four digits.

The formula:

The dates after formatting:

format date TEXT

The TEXT function is more than formatting dates; this is just one usage that I explained in above section. You may learn more about this function: The TEXT function in Excel

The example of concatenating formatted dates

Let us get more comfortable with date formatting and create more useful text strings as a result of joining different cells with constant literals.

In the example below, column A contains Names and column B date of births. In column C, I will use the CONCATENATE function where a text string is used and corresponding A and B cells are joined in the formula as follows:

This is what we get:

format date dobs

Formatting dates specific to language by TEXT function

As we have seen in the custom date formatting example, you can display Locale specific date style. I showed an example of displaying dates in Arabic style by using custom date option in “Format cells” dialog.

You may also specify the language code in the TEXT function for displaying dates based on locales.

See the following example where I displayed dates in various languages by using TEXT function.

The resultant sheet:

format date languages

The following formulas are used for different languages:

For German:

French:

Chinese (Traditional):

Japanese:

Arabic:

For Hindi:

Urdu:

List of language codes

Following is the list of language codes that you may use in the TEXT function for locale-specific date formatting:

Lang. Code          Language

  • 042B                Armenian
  • 044D                Assamese
  • 082C                Azeri (Cyrillic)
  • 042C                Azeri (Latin)
  • 042D                Basque
  • 0423                Belarusian
  • 0445                Bengali
  • 0402                Bulgarian
  • 0804                Chinese (Simplified)
  • 0404                Chinese (Traditional)
  • 041A                Croatian
  • 0405                Czech
  • 0406                Danish
  • 0413                Dutch
  • 0C09                English (Australian)
  • 1009                English (Canadian)
  • 0809                English (U.K.)
  • 0409                English (U.S.)
  • 0464                Filipino
  • 040B                Finnish
  • 040C                French
  • 0C0C                French (Canadian)
  • 0462                Frisian
  • 0467                Fulfulde
  • 0456                Galician
  • 0437                Georgian
  • 0407                German
  • 0C07                German (Austrian)
  • 0807                German (Swiss)
  • 0408                Greek
  • 0447                Gujarati
  • 040D                Hebrew
  • 0439                Hindi
  • 040E                Hungarian
  • 0421                Indonesian
  • 0410                Italian
  • 0411                Japanese
  • 044B                Kannada
  • 0460                Kashmiri (Arabic)
  • 0412                Korean
  • 0476                Latin
  • 0426                Latvian
  • 0427                Lithuanian
  • 042F                Macedonian FYROM
  • 043E                Malay
  • 044C                Malayalam
  • 043A                Maltese
  • 0458                Manipuri
  • 044E                Marathi
  • 0450                Mongolian
  • 0461                Nepali
  • 0414                Norwegian Bokmal
  • 0463                Pashto
  • 0429                Persian
  • 0415                Polish
  • 0416                Portuguese (Brazil)
  • 0816                Portuguese (Portugal)
  • 0446                Punjabi
  • 0418                Romanian
  • 0419                Russian
  • 044F                Sanskrit
  • 0C1A                Serbian (Cyrillic)
  • 081A                Serbian (Latin)
  • 0459                Sindhi
  • 045B                Sinhalese
  • 041B                Slovak
  • 0424                Slovenian
  • 0477                Somali
  • 0C0A                Spanish
  • 0441                Swahili
  • 041D                Swedish
  • 045A                Syriac
  • 0428                Tajik
  • 045F                Tamazight (Arabic)
  • 085F                Tamazight (Latin)
  • 0449                Tamil
  • 044A                Telugu
  • 041E                Thai
  • 041F                Turkish
  • 0442                Turkmen
  • 0422                Ukrainian
  • 0420                Urdu
  • 0843                Uzbek (Cyrillic)
  • 0443                Uzbek (Latin)
  • 042A                Vietnamese
  • 0478                Yi
  • 046A                Yoruba

The example of calculating age in Years/Months and days

The following example uses the DATEDIF function for calculating the difference between current date and date of birth.

The current date is retrieved by using the TODAY() function. The Birth Date is stored in A column. The C column displays the formatted age in years, months and number of days.

The DATEDIF formula:

The resultant sheet:

format date difference

For learning about the DATEDIF function, visit this tutorial: Excel DATEDIF function and formulas.