Roger - thank you so much! I had no idea Windows was the culprit - was
thinking it was Excel.

Thank you!

Heidi

"Roger Govier" wrote:

Hi Heidi

When I group by Week, Excel outputs in the same setting as for my
Regional settings for the short format of Date, which here in the UK I
have set as dd/mm/yyyy.

I am able to use =LEFT(F5,10) to extract the first date from
08/01/2007 - 14/01/2007

Check your Regional settings through StartControl PanelRegional
settings

--
Regards

Roger Govier


"Heidi" wrote in message
...
I have dates as my row fields.

Problem: I want to group data by week/month/etc., but don't want to
graph
the long text that excel spits out (ie 8/29/2005 - 9/4/2005).
Instead, I
want to "extract" just the first date of range using LEFT, or some
other text
function. This way I can format as date, and then graph (regular
chart, not
pivotchart) on a timescale, manipulate data more easily, etc.

However, it appears that no matter how I set the number format in the
original data, or in the field settings of the pivotTable, when I
group the
dates the dates come out m/d/yyyy. I don't care what the format, but
I want
the dates to have a consistent number of digits(like mm/dd/yyyy) so I
can
extract using the LEFT command.

Is there a way to do this? Or am I making this too complicated? Is
there
an easier way?

Thank you!
Heidi