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In this video I explain how to convert dates stored as text to date values that Excel recognizes using Flash Fill. There are many ways to go about this task, so I'm presenting this as a data cleansing challenge to you. I'd like you to share your method for converting this text to a date in the comments below.

Download the example file here: https://www.excelcampus.com/tips/convert-text-to-dates-flash-fill/

This question was submitted by Mark, a member of my Pivot Ready Course. He was a column of dates in his data set that are stored as text.

Excel does NOT recognize the values as dates, and therefore Mark is not able to sort the column or use it with the date grouping feature of a pivot table.

So we must first convert the cells to date values that are recognized by Excel. I share one solution to this problem in the video using the Flash Fill feature of Excel.

Flash Fill was introduced in Excel 2013 for Windows, and it's a great tool for data cleansing tasks like this.

Of course there are many other ways to solve this problem. Please leave a comment below with your solution. I will then create a follow-up video and explain the suggested solutions.

Thank you! :-)

Related articles & videos:
Article on How Dates Work in Excel: https://www.excelcampus.com/functions/how-dates-work-in-excel/
Video on How Dates Work in Excel: https://youtu.be/KlCAAQ_tQLA