Trying to use an Excel Date and Time function, but Excel returns a serial number instead of date; this is because Excel stores dates and times in serial numbers in the backend; for instance, when ...

Why is my number stored as text in Excel? Excel doesn’t convert numbers written in text into digits if you import data from another source because of the default setting.

Microsoft Excel depends on data that’s stored correctly. If you receive text values that should be real numbers, use one of these methods to get you back to the real work.

Mary Ann Richardson explains that when concatenating date and text cell data in an Excel formula, you need to convert date cells to text to avoid unexpected results.