Two options worth trying:
Copy a blank cell, then select your cells & edit/ paste special/ add.
or
Select your column of data, then Data/ Text to columns/ Next/ Next/ Column
date format: DMY or MDY as appropriate to your input data/ Finish.
--
David Biddulph

"T1 Red Alarm" wrote in message
...
Well, it looks like a date, and there is no other characeters, but its not
recgnoized as a date. It's left justified, and when sorting, it sorts as
text - 01/01/07 before 03/03/06. and selected the cells and setting
format
as text has no effect.

"Duke Carey" wrote:

What do you mean, specifically, by "I can't convert." What's the format
of
the text -Excel cannot almost certainly recognize it and convert it to a
datevalue.

"T1 Red Alarm" wrote:

I get a file exported from an AS400 into excel, but it exports as excel
2.1,
and all the dates come over as text, and I can't convert. I have to
save as
a tab delimited file, then import to excel (2003), which corrects the
problem.

Is there a command line excel function to open a .txt file and then
save as
excel without haveing to manually launch the application?