Excel keeps breaking the data formatting

Question

I'm looking for a way to have a text and, at the end of it, having the current date, such as "20/02/2026 09:25".
Unfortunately my cell just won't budge, and it's presenting the formula as you can see in the attached image.

I tried everything I could find online, to no avail. No cell formatting worked, neither attempting to hide formulas.

Any idea what could be going on? It's probably somehing silly...

Answer 1

Hi @Lucas Caiã Hahn.

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Regarding your issue, when you use the & operator to concatenate text with a date/time function like AGORA() (or NOW() in English), Excel doesn't carry over the date formatting instead, it returns the raw serial number that Excel uses to store dates internally. That's why you're seeing something like 46162,3912282407 instead of a formatted date. 

The solution is to wrap AGORA() inside the TEXTO() function (or TEXT() in English) to format the date before it gets concatenated.  

For English Excel: 

="Sample Text "&TEXT(NOW(),"DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM") 

Or in Portuguese Excel:

="Sample Text "&TEXTO(AGORA();"DD/MM/AAAA HH:MM") 

This converts the date/time into the formatted text first and then joins it with the rest of the string.

Note: Since your Excel is in Portuguese, make sure to use semicolons (;) as the argument separator. If AAAA doesn't work for the year, try YYYY instead it may vary depending on your Excel version. 

Hopefully it will help work with your issue and if you have any other questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask.   

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