You don't.

Regards,
Fred.

"jean" wrote in message
...

General means whatever number format fits in the cell. Dates and times are
stored by Excel as a whole number of days since 1/1/1900 plus the fraction
of the day since it began at midnight. Today is 39704, for example. To
display a number as a date, you need to use any of the date formats, such as
mm/dd/yy.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"jean" wrote in message
...

Others have told you why you cannot do what you asked, but I am curious...
why do you think you needed to do what you asked for in the first place?

--
Rick (MVP - Excel)


"jean" wrote in message
...

Has to do with exporting Excel data into another program to create bar codes.
We have an internal problem that changed dates imported into Excel from a
host system to m/d/yyyy (date format) from mm/dd/yy (general format). My IT
group is figure out why and how my imported data was changed. In the
meantime, I can't get it back to general without retyping. I can reformat the
date or change the regional setting to view dates as mm/dd/yy (date), but
that doesn't t help the person on the other end.

"Rick Rothstein" wrote:

Others have told you why you cannot do what you asked, but I am curious...
why do you think you needed to do what you asked for in the first place?

--
Rick (MVP - Excel)


"jean" wrote in message
...

mm/dd/yy is not general; that is a date format.
12/30/08 is one of the date options; 39812 is what you get in general.
--
David Biddulph

"jean" wrote in message
...
Has to do with exporting Excel data into another program to create bar
codes.
We have an internal problem that changed dates imported into Excel from a
host system to m/d/yyyy (date format) from mm/dd/yy (general format). My
IT
group is figure out why and how my imported data was changed. In the
meantime, I can't get it back to general without retyping. I can reformat
the
date or change the regional setting to view dates as mm/dd/yy (date), but
that doesn't t help the person on the other end.

"Rick Rothstein" wrote:

Others have told you why you cannot do what you asked, but I am
curious...
why do you think you needed to do what you asked for in the first place?

--
Rick (MVP - Excel)


"jean" wrote in message
...

Real dates in Excel are actually a floating point number with the whole
number part representing the number of days past 12/31/1899 (so 1 is January
1, 1900, 2 is January 2, 1900, 32 is February 1, 1900, 39708 is today,
September 17, 2008, etc.) and the decimal part is fraction of a day, that
is, the number of decimal hours past midnight divided by the 24 hours in
that day (so 3:00 AM is 0.125, 9:00 AM is 0.375, 3:30 PM is
0.645833333333333, etc.). When you format a date value as General, it
displays that underlying floating point value... so I don't think your
original question is exactly the right one.

If I had to guess, I would say your imported dates are being brought into
Excel as text that happens to look like dates, rather than as a *real* Excel
date. If I am right, you can do the following to convert all these cells to
real Excel dates all at once. Select your entire column of dates, click
Data/TextToColumns from Excel's menu bar, click the Next button twice on the
dialog box that comes up (takes you to Step 3 or 3 as reported in the dialog
box's Title Bar), click the Date option button located in the upper right
corner of the dialog box (pick MDY from its drop down box if it is not
already selected) and click Finish. All your text dates (if that is what
they actually are) will now be true Excel dates.

--
Rick (MVP - Excel)


"jean" wrote in message
...
Has to do with exporting Excel data into another program to create bar
codes.
We have an internal problem that changed dates imported into Excel from a
host system to m/d/yyyy (date format) from mm/dd/yy (general format). My
IT
group is figure out why and how my imported data was changed. In the
meantime, I can't get it back to general without retyping. I can reformat
the
date or change the regional setting to view dates as mm/dd/yy (date), but
that doesn't t help the person on the other end.

"Rick Rothstein" wrote:

Others have told you why you cannot do what you asked, but I am
curious...
why do you think you needed to do what you asked for in the first place?

--
Rick (MVP - Excel)


"jean" wrote in message
...