When you create Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that contain one or more columns of dates, you can make things a bit easier if you pre-format your cells to display date information the way you want ...

The cell can be formatted to accept dates in that form, and you can choose the display format to which the date converts when you press Enter. For example, "2018-07-31" can be automatically ...

For example, Excel will automatically choose the date format for a cell that contains 11/11/19. You can set Excel to display dates in a variety of ways, no matter how you type in the data.

TL;DR Key Takeaways : Use Excel’s fill handle to quickly generate sequential or custom interval date lists by dragging and extending patterns, making sure cells are formatted as dates.

The first thing you can do to prevent Excel from automatically changing a number to date is to change the format of problematic cells to text. Here are the steps to do that: First, select all the ...

The Custom category in Excel's Format Cells dialog box, with a custom date typed into the Type field, and the alternative custom dates highlighted. Some data in Excel, with column D filled blue.

Now, let’s set a conditional formatting rule that highlights due dates that match the current date, which in this case is Feb. 13, 2021: Select the data. In this case, that’s C4:C8.