By default, excel stores the date as a number and it gives you the flexibility to change the appearance of the date as per the requirement.
Excel has an umpteen number of predefined date formats that are available for use and also we could create our own customized date formats.
Below is an example where we could see different formats for the same date.
To apply the format to a date, select the date and click on the Number Format drop down and select “More Number Formats” or you could press keyboard shortcut Ctrl+1 to open the Format Cells menu.
After you get the menu for Format Cells , select Date from the box at the left and select a format from a large number of date formats available here by scrolling the format box.
And press OK.
You could see below that we have applied the desired format.
Custom Date Format
Do not worry if you do not get the date format that matches your requirement, excel offers you a lot of other custom formats where you could modify the formats as per your requirement.
Select the custom from the menu at the left and select date format from the menu at the right side.
There is another concept of custom format strings which we have explained in a different section.
