Custom Formatting Dates And Times In Excel

Building on what we covered in the last lecture, we'll now look at using dates and times in Excel.

We will cover custom formatting dates in Excel. By doing this, we can immediately see what day any particular date falls on...very useful.

There are a bunch of built-in date formats, but we want to be able to create our own, using the various format tags:

mm = 12 (for December)
dd = 31 (for the 31st)
yy = 17 (for 2017)

So mm-dd-yy would give us 12-31-17

And dd-mm-yyyy would give us 31-12-2017

We could also use:

ddd = Thu (the short form of Thursday)
ddd = Thursday (you can see what that does).

mmm = Dec (short form of December)
mmmm = December (!)

So, if you wanted to show Thu 31 Dec 17 (I don't know if that is the day, by the way), you could custom format "ddd dd mmm yy"

We'll also take a look at how to enter time in Excel. Often, I see people entering time as a decimal. So half past nine would be entered 9.5, or worse still, 9.3.

Time in Excel is always entered with a colon between the hours and minutes, so 9:30 would be the correct way to enter this...

Enjoy!

This is a sample lecture from my course, Microsoft Excel Essentials: Level 2 - Intermediate/Advanced.

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