Using specific date and time formats, you can display a date or time in many ways. That’s not how Excel stores a date, though—not as the formatted string that you see.

You can set Excel to display dates in a variety of ways, no matter how you type in the data. Here's how to find and change date formats in Excel on a Mac or PC.

Create a custom date format based on one of Excel's standard date templates. For example, set all months to display as two digits by adding another "M" to the month format code. Advertisement ...

When it's time to set a date, you have a wide variety of options in spreadsheet programs such as Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel. There are essentially three types of dates you can set: dynamic ...

Microsoft Word has a date field, but it's not easy to use in an expression. If you need to update dates in a document, use Excel to calculate the dates and then run a mail merge.