If your cell contains a date in the form of a text string, for example, “March 8, 2013”, then for Excel this, of course, is not a date, but text. To convert a text date into a full date (read – into a numeric date code, because inside Excel any date is represented by a numeric code), you can use a special function DATA IDENTIFIER (DATEVALUE). She knows how to turn various text variants of her spelling into a normal date:
As you can see from the screenshot, only English-language dates (if you have Excel installed), with cases of months (because they are not in English in principle) and with very indistinct digital sets like “18 3 17” will have problems with the conversion. For everything else, this feature works great.
If a comma was used to enter dates instead of a period or a slash (which is often the case when using an additional numeric keypad), then you will first have to replace the comma with a period using the function SUBSTITUTE (SUBSTITUTE) and then use the function DATA IDENTIFIER to convert the resulting text to a real date:
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