One way:

=--SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"st",""),"nd", ""),"th","")

Format as a date.

In-place:

Do three Edit/Replaces (i.e., replace st, nd and th with nothing).

In article ,
morlo wrote:

I have a rather large spreadsheet where someone has input the date as text
eg. 12th January 2004, and 2nd April 2001.

Is there a simple way that I can get this into a numerical format ie
12/01/2004 so can easily use it to calculate time periods along with other
date I have?

Thanks!