How To Get Your Excel Data To Display Properly

Have you been frustrated trying to input “0-1” in Excel only to find it keeps converting it into a date format! How do you get it to show as “0-1” to show as this and not 01-Jan?

Thankfully Excel has a TEXT function which is a lot more flexible than the Format Cells dialog box.

The list below shows you how to fix the above problem using TEXT function. It presents three examples and what TEXT function will return with each of four formats.

Column A What you want      Column B What you got         What you would type in

0-1                                                01-Jan                                        =TEXT($A$1,”D-M”)

12-12                                            12-Dec                                        =TEXT($A$2,””DD-MM”)

In summary, TEXT is a good option for you to format your values.

For example, you can also use format “DD-MM-YYYY” to display “25-12-2017”.