I am using Excel XP. I have imported a chart from a word processing program,
not Word, into Excel. Everything works find , except for some of the date
entries. I have two columns of dates, one for birth and one for death. In
each column I several entries that will not reform. They show to be either
'general' or 'custom'. I have made several attempts to reformat them to
'date' but they will change

Any Ideas?

Try the TRIM formula on them...
If it does not work then paste a few examples here...

"david d" wrote:

I am using Excel XP. I have imported a chart from a word processing program,
not Word, into Excel. Everything works find , except for some of the date
entries. I have two columns of dates, one for birth and one for death. In
each column I several entries that will not reform. They show to be either
'general' or 'custom'. I have made several attempts to reformat them to
'date' but they will change

Any Ideas?

On Sat, 13 Sep 2008 21:27:01 -0700, david d
wrote:

I am using Excel XP. I have imported a chart from a word processing program,
not Word, into Excel. Everything works find , except for some of the date
entries. I have two columns of dates, one for birth and one for death. In
each column I several entries that will not reform. They show to be either
'general' or 'custom'. I have made several attempts to reformat them to
'date' but they will change

Any Ideas?

They are probably there as text, and possibly with non-printing characters or
<space's included.

Try the Data/Text-to-columns wizard, selecting only the one column, and the
appropriate date format for the source data.
--ron