Question : Excel dates going into ms Access as number

Oh dates :-( dates in excel and access make me sad! ;)

So, for some reason I have a column which contains dates... some appear to be dates but are actually text (=ISTEXT() function gives TRUE) and the others appears to be dates and they are numbers (=ISTEXT() function give FALSE - so I think this means that they really can be dates).

So, problem is when importing that column to MS Access. The dates formatted as text appear correctly in Access (Access decides this is a text column) and dates formatted as number come in as a number.

Either way, it doesn't work properly, and neither are in date/time format in access.

So (1) how can i get them to all go into access as text and in the right format and (2) how can I get them all to go in as a real date/time and for Access to choose 'Date/Time' as the column format instead of deciding it must be Text.

I don't know what's happened here but actually it kind of looks like wherever the source was, it was in american date format, and then downloaded to excel with european date format... so now it is not possible to change the date format. I'm not totally sure what to do with that, is is possible to specify that the date is american and convert it to european?

Answer : Excel dates going into ms Access as number

I tried the attached trick. See column B.

Excel-Dates.xls (23 KB) (File Type Details) 

Formatted date