Excel Changes Dates into Numbers Automatically

Question

Everytime I enter a date into a cell (e.g. 11/6/1989), Excel keeps changing it into a five or six digit number. How can I get it to stop doing this?

Answer 1

The cell that you are trying to enter the date into is formatted wrong. It depends on your version of Excel, but for the latest as of this writing (Excel 2016), you can change the cell's format to "Date" by following these steps:

1. Right click the cell.
2. Click "Format Cells..."
3. In the box labeled "Category", click the "Date" field.
4. Hit the "OK" button.

If this does not work for you, you can force Excel to display the date verbatim by adding an apostrophe (the ' character) before your data (like '11/6/1989).