Why do we have to use "text-to-columns" to turn text to dates?

[shadestreet]

One of my biggest pet-peeves with Excel is that I have regularly rely on Text-to-Columns to convert dates in text format to a real date format (among other things too).

I have only dabbled in 2007 a bit but seemed to be a similar problem there. Is there some logical explanation why you cant simply format the cells like you would anything else? This has always annoyed me and I am sure everyone else too.

thanks

[Bryan Hessey]

One of my biggest pet-peeves with Excel is that I have regularly rely on Text-to-Columns to convert dates in text format to a real date format (among other things too).

I have only dabbled in 2007 a bit but seemed to be a similar problem there. Is there some logical explanation why you cant simply format the cells like you would anything else? This has always annoyed me and I am sure everyone else too.

thanks

Hi,

I can't say that I have ever had to convert Text-dates to dates except on the import of a .csv or .txt file, in which case I use the import wizard on .txt format files, and rename the .csv to .txt if the problem of dates exists in a .csv. No doubt this could become VBA code for repetative imports, but I have not yet had to resort to that.

Any further clues as to how your problem arises?

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