You need to do something like:

="Date: "&TEXT(D1,"yyyy-mm-dd")

where I have assumed your date is in D1.

Hope this helps.

Pete

On Aug 24, 5:24*pm, SK08 wrote:
I have a concatenate formula that includes a cell that contains a
date. The date is set to a custom date format of YYYY-MM-DD. However,
the formula is returning all numbers ( i believe the equivalent of the
general format of the date). For example, for 2006-03-31, the
contatenate formula shows 38807. I need it to retain the formatting of
the cell w/the date. thank you!