How to change date format in Excel

Excel users frequently want to change the date format in one or more columns. For example to change between 2 of these formats:

• 2020-01-31
• 01/31/2020
• 31/01/2020
• 31 Jan 2020
• Thursday 31 January 2020

You can do this easily in Easy Data Transform:

1. Install Easy Data Transform on your PC or Mac, if you haven’t done so already. It will only take a minute. There is a fully functional free trial and you don’t have to give us your email or sign up to anything.
2. Start Easy Data Transform. Make sure the Auto Run button is pressed in.

1. Drag the Excel spreadsheet whose columns you wish to change date format of onto Easy Data Transform. If there is more than one sheet, you will be asked to select sheets. Just select one sheet with dates for now. A pink input item will be added.
2. Ensuring the pink input item is selected, click the Date Format button in the Left pane.

A blue transform item is added and selected.

In the Right pane:

• Select the column(s) you wish to change.
• Set the current date format in these columns in Format from.
• Set the new date format in these columns in Format to.

You can now see that the date format has been changed in the selected columns.

Note that Easy Data Transform inputs dates from Excel in yyyy-mm-dd format, regardless of how they are displayed in Excel.

For more details about Date Format options see the Date Format documentation.

Ensuring that the blue transform item is selected, click the To File button at the bottom of the Left pane to create a new output file (you might have to scroll down to see it). Choose Excel as the file type.

If you need to change large numbers of Excel sheets you can do it in a single operation using the batch processing feature.

Easy Data Transform allows you to combine multiple transforms, such as Date Format, to quickly and easily create complex data transformations. For example, you can also combine columns, split columns, merge spreadsheets and dedupe rows, much more easily than you can in Excel. Easy Data Transform can process millions of rows, and input and output in multiple formats.