On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 13:19:03 -0800, "gkaspen"
<gkaspen@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>Ron,
>
>Thanks, that did exactly what I needed done. But I'm curious what the
>forward AND backward slashes in the date format does?
>
>Greg

From HELP for number formatting:

Displaying both text and numbers To display both text and numbers in a cell,
enclose the text characters in double quotation marks (" ") or precede a single
character with a backslash (\).

It is simpler (and requires fewer characters) to precede the desired character
(/) with a backslash.

The backslash, of course, is the separator for the portions of the date.

The equivalent, without the backslashes, would be:

=--TEXT(LEFT(A1,6),"00""/""00""/""00")


--ron