Text to Column doesn't always work for dates - WHY?

Hi Dickison:

Please look at the following simulation. I did not have much luck using formulas in native Excel, but I could convert the entry in cell A1 to date entry in cell B1 ...

using the following code ...
I hope this helps. If I have misunderstood the question -- my apologies!

If I understand your response, I am to make a macro using your formula. Macros are still untested by me, so that may work, but what I'm looking for is the reason a spreadsheet won't convert text to columns sometimes and will other times with the exact same kind of data. I suspect there is a setting somewhere that I need to change. For example, one problem I had was because the font was unicode. When I changed to a non-unicode font things worked as expected. On the spreadsheet that I had that wouldn't work, it had unicode. I changed it but that didn't fix the text to column problem. Then I noticed that the file was in html format rather than xls. I changed to xls and that didn't fix it either. This is the type of glitch it is I suspect because it works fine other times. I even open a brand new spreadsheet and then copy the data over, but that doesn't fix it either. The problem isn't just how to do it since I know how to do the formulas to convert and I can save as a text file and re-import to fix it. But those techniques are work-arounds for the basic problem of why it's not converting in the first place. That's what I need to know so I can directly fix it in the future.

The reason Text to Columns fails to convert your dates is because they aren't in a recognized date format. If your dates had a comma after the day and a space before AM/PM Text to Columns would work just fine. You can use this formula will convert your dates...

Edit : Just saw Master Mark_W's post -- so hopefully this settles it!

Hi Dickinson:

I played around a bit with various possible entries -- I could utilize DATA_Text_to_Columns with just date entries that appear as OCT 1 2003; but I could not suuccessfully utilize DATA_Text_to_Columns with entries that included time that appeare as OCT 1 2003 12:00 AM

The macro that I proposed ...
did work for me in my limited testing of various combinations that i tried.

Please do post back to tell us what worked and how you finally resolved it!

Hi Mark:

In the following illustration ...

I used DATA_Text_to_Columns to convert entries in column A and write the resulting true Date_Time entries in the corresponding row in column B. Entries in cells A18 and A19 did not convert because as you pointed out that these are not in an Excel acceptable data format. However, the entry in cell A21 which is also not in acceptable Excel Date_Time format did get converted -- Any Ideas on this one?