Excel Dates Showing Numbers? Here’s the Quick Fix

Adjust Excel Date Serial Number Formating Issue: When you work on Excel date dates like today, eomontth, edate function, etc., the output can be confusing. For example, in implementation =EDATE(TODAY(), 6) The function that is assumed today as March 14, 2025, the output we expect is currently, instead, we get the output as 45914. What exactly happens behind it is quite interesting.

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Why did this error occur?

By default, Excel stores are dates as serial numbers starting January 01, 1990 which means January 01, 1990 is considered to be the 1st day. Therefore, March 14, 2025 will be 45914th days and this is shown as output. The =EDATE(TODAY(), 6) The function that is assumed today as March 14, 2025 has been successfully executed and in a way, 45914 is the correct answer though, however, we expect the output in the date format and that is the answer. We just have to change the Format number of this output.

Quick Excel Date Date Serial Number Formatting Issue – Simple Steps

You can change the Format number by two ways.

1. With a shortcut
2. With the Home tab

With the shortcut

This is the fastest way to fix the Excel Date Serial Number Formating issue. For the explanation, let's assume, we are conducting an edate operating as follows.

=EDATE(TODAY(), 6)

• The above operation should return the exact date 6 months from now. Instead of the output of the date, we got the value as 45915. This is because now (March 15, 2025) is the 45915th Day from January 01, 1990. Here's the arrangement.

• Select the cell and the press Ctrl + 1.
• Format cells Windows will now open. Under CategoryYou can find a variety of Number formatsFrom general, number, money, accounting, time, percentage, special, and more. Here, choose Date Format.

• On the right, you will have different types of date, for example, a date can be MM-DD-yy, or DD-MM-yyyy, or DD-Month-yy, and so on. Choose your preferred Date type and then click Ok.
• Now, the output will be a date format.

With the Home tab

This is an alternate way to organize the Excel Date Serial Number Formating issue. The following are the steps.

• Let's assume we are conducting the same operation =EDATE(TODAY(), 6)And we get output 45915.
• Select the output cell where the value is displayed in another format, and click the house and then go to the number.

• Dropdown and you can choose either Short date o Long date. The short date will be MM/DD/Yyyy, whereas, the long date will show value as the sun, moon, DD, yyyy. Select accordingly.
• I choose the Short date.

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Explained above the two methods provide a detailed solution to Adjust Excel Date Serial Number Formating Issue. If you work on a list of dates through an entire column, you can select the entire column and move it to the date format using any of the upper two methods. This article was originally published on how to fix the Excel Date Serial Number Formating issue?