excel date formatting not working

Question

I have an excel sheet created by a 3rd party program.

One of the columns has dates in this format: "Jan 19, 2015 03:00:00 PM"

I would like these dates to appear in the following format: "19/01/2015"

I have selected the cell or cells, right clicked and selected "Format Cells...", chose "Date" in the category, then chose "14/03/2001" in the type, to no avail, the dates won't change.

I also tried "Custom" from the category and "dd/mm/yyyy" from the type, again, no changes at all.

The file is not protected, the sheet is editable.

Could someone explain what I could be doing wrong?

Regards Crouz

Answer 1

The following worked for me:

• Select the date column.
• Go to the Data-tab and choose "Text to Columns".
• On the first screen, leave radio button on "delimited" and click Next.
• Unselect any delimiter boxes (everything blank) and click Next.
• Under column data format choose Date
• Click Finish.

Now you got date values