Question

I have a google spreadsheet in which I want a date with only the name of the month and the year, like September 2011, and I also want the month and year to be easily changeable.
Is there any way of getting custom date formats to do this?

I figured out I could do like this:

=TEXT(40295; "MMMM yy")

But then the datepicker can’t be used anymore and changing the date is made impossibly hard..
Is there any good way of solving this?

Answer 1

You can set a custom format to a cell using Google Apps Script.
Open the script editor (menu Tools > Script editor), paste this, save and Run > onOpen.

function onOpen() {
  SpreadsheetApp.getActive().addMenu(
    'Format', [{name:'Custom', functionName:'customFormat'}]);
}

function customFormat() {
  var format = Browser.inputBox('Write the format to be applied on the seleted cells');
  if( format !== 'cancel' )
    SpreadsheetApp.getActiveRange().setNumberFormat(format);
}

On your spreadsheet a new menu should appear in the end where you can pick the Custom entry to enter your custom format for the selected cells.