USA Date conversion to European format

How can I convert USA format MM/DD/YYYY such as 09/01/1900 into European format DD/MM/YYYY ( 1 Sep 1900 in this example) ?

Hello,

Case 1 Date is a real calc date (i.e. a number)

if it is really a calc date (and not text) then:

  • Format -> Cells > Tab: Numbers -> Category: Date and enter:
  • Format Code DD/MM/YYYY

Case 2 Date is in fact of type “text

If you got text, use the following procedure:

  • Select your column
  • Menu Edit -> Find & Replace
    Find: (\d+)\/(\d+)\/(\d+)
    Replace: '$2/$1/$3
    Other Options 1: [x] Current selection only
    Other Options 2: [x] Regular expressions
  • Click Replace All

How to tell whether it is a number or text?

View -> [x] Value Highlighting: If the date is shown in blue color, it is a date (number), if it keeps to be black, it is text.

Hope that helps.

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If the date is fully entered in a cell, i.e. it is not spread in three adjacent cells for year, month and day (in which case it is quite trivial to reorder the elements in other cells), it is just a matter of formatting.

Dates are floating point numbers as days elapsed since the epoch: days as integral part, part of day in fractional part.

Select the cells (or copy of them if you want both styles of writing), Format>Cells, Numbers tab. Select Date category. In Format code, enter DD/MM/YYYY.

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Once more - another version of the same explanations:

ConvertDates.gif

Slow version on YouTube

Please how do I slow down this answer? I simply cannot cope with thee speed

I have here a “video sequence” to guide me. It is so fast that I cannot cope. Can I slow this down?

Please see here (YouTube)