I have a excel file imported from some other application. When I try
to apply a formatting to a particular column that has 'date' values,
the formatting does not take effect. For example if the value in the
column is:
1/10/02
If I try to apply a date formatting (Europe) I should get 10/1/02. But
Excel does not do anything. However, if I click on the value of the
column (next to 'fx') then excel recognizes it as Date value and then
I can format it. There are thousands of rows in the file and I can not
manually click on each value so that Excel recognizes it as date
value. How can I have Excel to format it as date when it does not do
anything? The option Format-Cells and then 'Date' is not working and
it is not doing any formatting at all!

What I had done is that originally the column had values like 'SU MTH/
1/02 (Thousands)' and after doing a formula: concatenate("01",mid...) I
get 01/1/02 (I added first of each month) which is European date (day/
month/year) and then I want to apply the formatting for English (UK)
so that excel recognizes it as European date and then formats is as
valid date as English(US).