1.5 Customizing Date Entries

Overview 

A date is a number. You can apply currency or percentage format to your entry, or use custom date format.

In Excel, a date is the number of days since 01/01/1900 (which is the first date in Excel). For example, 42370 is the number of days between the 01/01/1900 and 01/01/2016.

Usually, when you insert a date in a cell it is displayed in the format dd/mm/yyyy. Now if you change the cell’s format to Standard, the cell displays 42370. An animation on how to covert dates to integers and vice versa is shown in figure 1.

Dates can be displayed in different ways using the following 2 options available in the Number Format drop-down in the main menu:

• Short Date
• Long Date

You can write the same date in different formats:

• 01/01/2018
• Jan 2018
• Mon, 1 Jan 2018

Excel uses three date parameter:

• d for day
• m for month
• y for year

Customizing a Date

To customize a date, do the following tasks:

1. Click dialog box launcher for Number group to open Format Cells dialog box (figure 3).

By default, the Number tab is always the active tab in the Format Cells dialogue box. However, if the tab is inactive, then simply

2. Click Number tab.

3. Scroll down and select in Custom in the Category list.

4. Write or click your choice of date format code in Type text box.

Option 2 

Alteratively, you can customize date by doing the following tasks:

1. Select the cells you want to format.

2. Press CTRL plus 1.

3. Click the Number tab in the Format Cells box, see figure 4.

4. Click Date in he Category list.

5. Under Type, pick a date format. Your format will preview in the Sample box with the first date in your data.

6. If you want to use a date format according to how another language displays dates, choose the language in Locale (location).

Note

▣▣▣