Date Format "stuck"

[Guest]

Sometimes - especially when I copy/paste from Access - dates look like dates,
I can format the cells as dates, but they're not *really* dates. For
instance, if I format the cell as a number, I should get the serial date.
Or, if I change the date format from mm/dd/yy to m/d/yyyy, it should change.
If I manually delete a /, retype it and hit enter, it suddenly recognizes it
as a date. But, if I try to automate this workaround with a find/replace, it
still doesn't recognize it as a date. What's up? I *really* don't want to
manually do it with a thousand cells.

 

[Guest]

Normally it will work with find and replace (find the slash and replace it
with the identical slash or find and replcae the 0 with a 0) so long as you
reformt the cell to date prior to doing the replace. Failing that you can
use the excel function Datevalue which takes a date in text and returns the
Serial date...

 

[Guest]

So, I tried that before I saw your post. I had all the dates formatted as
number so I would see the change. I replaced all the slashes with an
identical one. I didn't see any change . . . but, what had happened was it
not only recognized it as a date, it changed all the cells to the appropriate
format. The way I figured out that it was happening correctly was that the
dates in my pivot table suddenly sorted correctly when I refreshed it.

Thank you for the answer.

 

[Guest]

When you change formatts of source data for a pivot table you need to refresh
the pivot table twice for the change to take effect. Just a quirk of pivot
tables. That could have been the problem...