Date changed to numeric in Excel

Question

All of a sudden all my dates in a sheet in an Excel workbook changed,  Example is that 8/20/18 changed to 43332.  Can not make it revert to 8/20/18 though that shows up in the Formula Bar.

Answer 1

Excel dates are actually the number of days since January 1, 1900

They must be formatted to the style of date you wish.

For some reason you have lost the mm/dd/yy formatting and you see the numbers.

Format as you wish.

Gord

Answer 2

Hi Judith

In the back of Excel Dates are stored as numbers, this is just a formatting issue . . .

Select those cells, then right click and choose Format Cells

Set the cell format to Date - choose a Data format . . .

Answer 3

Had tried this before but tried again.  Followed instructions and did another try where I formated a block of cells with date format.  Did not work.  Then I tried to enter the date I wanted and it still came back with the number.  Sorry, should have worked I think.

Answer 4

Hi Judith, is this related to your other post where you can just see formulas, are both these things happening at the same time?

May I ask does this only happen on the same workbook or is this happening on all worksheets?

Answer 5

Your first answer to my question about the Formula Auditing/Show Formulas also cured my date problem since MIcrosoft considers the numeric date a formula.

So long as I had Show Formulas ON, I could not change the date format in the usual way as you suggested in this response. 

Thank you very much.