Creating pivot table from .csv, but date formatted as text

[cornflakegirl]

I have a .csv file with about 400,000 lines. I'm using Excel 2003, so can't open the file in Excel. I need to create a pivot table from the file.

Currently we create an Access database, and then run a query that pulls a summarised version into Excel. This data is a count of policies by date, summarised by scheme ID. We then have to summarise further, so that we have a count of policies by month by scheme ID.

I'd like to simplify the process, and just create a pivot table straight from the .csv file. This works, except that it imports the dates as text, so I can't group them. (If I just open the .csv file in Excel, then it gives me the dates as numbers - but obviously I can't see the whole file.)

Is there a way to pull the dates into the pivot table as dates?

 

[cornflakegirl]

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