I have a dataset that looks like this (image attached, I hope). excelscreenshot.png

I think that Excel is currently recognizing this as text rather than numbers. These numbers are dates, with the digits before the slash referring to a month and the digits after the slash referring to a year. I cannot get excel to recognize this. I have spent an hour or so messing around with "format cells" but the only thing Excel wants to do is attach a "2012" on the end of my dates -- EG rather than realizing I mean "June 2008" in the first row, it thinks I mean "June 8, 2012."

I think the problem is compounded by the fact that some of these dates have a leading zero (like 06/08) and some don't (9/10). When I try to standardize this, Excel again jumps on adding a "2012" to everything.

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions that don't involve me manually editing 15,000 cells Thanks in advance.