Excel: Convert Column of Dates to Text

 If you have a column of date values in Excel but need to convert them into text values, there's a surprisingly simple trick to do so - and it's not exactly intuitive.

Select your column, then go to the 'Data' tab and click on 'Text to Columns'. I know, it's weird. We're not actually trying to split up our data into separate columns and I promise we won't.

On Step 1 of 3, choose 'Delimited'. Click 'Next'. 

On Step 2 of 3, deselect all of the 'Delimiters' so that nothing is selected. Click 'Next'.

Now here is the magic step. On Step 3 of 3, under 'Column data format', select 'Text'. Now click 'Finish'.

All of your dates should be actual text now instead of the integers that represent the dates. Yay!

Read More