Excel as you know is full of features, so you can solve any kind of query using this multifunctional tool. Sometimes you have a dataset that might be lacking in loaded date and you have to complete the month and day names. Short data with small calculations is not tricky; however, if you have loads of data, you need to take help from the tool.
Suppose we have a delivery system it needed to examine if any orders are due by the upcoming weekend or not.
Here in this post, we will elaborate on the Excel limits when working with dates or in short the long date format Excel.
Let’s begin with the reality of Long Date Format Excel and how it can be used.
What is the Long Date Format in Excel?
By default, your date format appears as m/d/yyyy for short dates, whenever you add a date in Excel. If you enter a date like this: 12-22-22, it will be displayed as 12/22/22 in Excel automatically. Excel considers a pasted date as a serial number, that’s why you need to take care of it.
When it comes to the Long Date Format, it has the month element given in its full form and it might be having additional options such as the day name and even sometimes the time. Considering all these facts, the date entry would be like this:
Thursday, December 22, 2022
This is also a default format preset in the regional format United States.
You can however make changes in this format according to your needs in terms of day name, month number, and year. In short, you can change anything in this format as per your demand. In the next section of this article, we will explain how can you apply Long Date Format Excel easily.
Let’s get started:
How to Apply Long Date Format Excel
You can apply this long-date format in Excel using different methods. However, this is not something that you can do using coding just because the date has numbers.
Actually, a date has a day, month, and year in simple. On the other hand, in the Long Date format, usually, the day name is included as well. Below are some date format codes:
d– it usually helps in returning the day in the date given in a single digit, such as 6 for the 6th, 12 for the 12th
dd– it helps in returning the day in the date given in double digits, such as 06 for the 6th and 12 for the 12th
ddd– it helps in returning a 3-letter abbreviation of the day name from the date, such as Mon for Monday
dddd– it helps in returning the day name in the full form date, such as Monday for Monday
m– it helps in returning the month in the date given in a single digit, such as 2 for February, 11 for November
mm– it helps in returning the month in the date given in double digits, such as 02 for February and 11 for November
mmm– it helps in returning the 3-letter abbreviation of the month name from the date, such as Dec for December
mmmm– it helps in returning the month name in the given full of the date, such as February for February
yy– it helps in returning the year from the date in double digits, such as 00 for 2000
yyy– it helps in returning the year from the date in full forms, such as 2010 for 2010
Now, most likely you have got an idea about how you can use these abbreviations to simply present a Long Date format. Excel by default chooses different separators such as the default forward slash (/), hyphen (-), period (.), and comma (,).
Consider this small example, the format code is:
dddd – dd.mm.yyyy
This format will be as 22/12/2022
Whereas 12/22/2022 will appear the date in the Long Date format as:
Thursday – 22.12.2022
Final Thoughts
The above-mentioned detail must be useful for you because the long date format is used occasionally. That’s the reason people most of the time mix these formats because they are not aware of the intent of these formats.
