Hi Geo

Excel can't work natively with dates before 1900 but
there is an add-in written on the site www.j-walk.com
that allows you to go back a few hundred more years.



Alternatively you could break the date up by using left,
mid and right if they are all the same witdth



OR if there is a delimiter i.e. a / then you could use
the text to columns feature and then concatenate the
columns back in the order that you want them



Best Regards

Paul

-----Original Message-----
I have a database with dates ranging from 1839 to the
present. I tried to
format date as mm/dd/yyyy and everything works fine.
When I needed to change
the format to yyyy/mm/dd, only the dates after 1900 were
formatted. Is there
a way to do this without retyping every cell in the
correct format. I have
over 28,000 records
.