MS Excel: Expand your date format choices

Don’t like Excel’s default date format choices? There are other options. They just happen to be buried in a counterintuitive area of the cell format menu. Select the cells that will contain the date, and click Format, Cells. Click the “Number” tab, and highlight “Custom.” A list of custom format starting points will appear in the white box at the right. Scroll through the list and highlight the format that most closely matches what you want. That format will then appear in the narrow white box just above the list, where you can then click on it and make alterations to suit. For instance, change M/D/YYYY to the more adaptable MM/DD/YYYY that many other software applications demand for a data export.