You didn't answer the questions I asked you in my other post, but based on
what you have said, I'm guessing the cells are formatted as text. If that is
the case, the try this... select your column of dates, click
Data/TextToColumns on Excel's menu bar and click the Finish button on the
dialog box that appears. Doing this should change any of your "text dates",
with or without trailing spaces, to real dates that you can then format as
you wish.

--
Rick (MVP - Excel)


"J.W. Aldridge" wrote in message
...
kept digging to find out problem...

found out there's a trailing space at the end of 2009-04-11 which
prevents it from being read as date or even changed into. I tried
several vba codes to remove trailing spaces, but for some reason that
doesnt work either. I download the data in its current format so I'm
guessing its reading as one object somehow? These numbers are all in
one column/string. Any suggestions would be appreciated.