Text file conversion to excel

[Michael M]

I received an excel file that was converted from several text files.
When trying to sort and vreate pivot tables it would not allow me to
group the data by date. I reviewed all the data and found some cells
in the date field were numbers such as 12/31/05 but others were
reflected as 365268. Any ideas of how to convert to enable grouping?

Thanks!

 

[Rick Rothstein \(MVP - VB\)]

My guess is those cells containing "numbers" such as 12/31/05 are not really
numbers; but, rather, are text that look like dates. See if this helps...
select the column with these dates and click Data/TextToColumn from Excel's
menu bar. Click OK **twice** and select Date (MDY) from the "Column data
format" panel, then click Finish and your date looking entries should now be
actual dates (you might also want to format the column as Date so all
entries display the same way).

Rick