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Asked: 2026-05-27T22:25:23+00:00

Context: I’m entering prior year data into Excel. Every time I type in the

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Context: I’m entering prior year data into Excel.

Every time I type in the date in the date column (“9/16” for September 16th), Excel automatically formats it to “9/16/12”, where 12 is 2012, the current year.

I’m entering data from last year in the current year 2012. I don’t want to type the “11” for 2011. I want Excel to automatically populate it as it does with 2012, and as it did on December 31st.

The simplest fix is to set the clock in Windows back to any time in 2011, but that tends to muck with the network which wants to set me back and complains about my network password being out of date, etc.

I prefer the date to reside in a single column, so tabbing to alternate columns for day/month/year is not an option for me.

One would think this is a simple fix, but a couple hours searching and my Google-fu is failing me.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    A quick fix is to just enter 9/16 and let Excel change it to 9/16/12. Then when you are all done entering your dates, in a new column, enter the formula =A1-365, and just copy the formula all the way down, assuming column A contains the dates that you entered.

    One watch-out on this: 2012 is a leap year, so for any dates after Feb 28 that you enter, your formula will need to be =A1-365.25 or else your dates will be off by one day. It doesn’t have to be 365.25, just something larger than 365 and smaller than 366.

    This works because no matter what the date format in the cell is, Excel stores the actual date as the number of elapsed days since January 0, 1900. (Yeah, January 0 isn’t a real date, but Excel thinks it is.)

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