News, Tips, and Advice for Technology Professionals

in Microsoft Office , in Software on August 17, 2009, 5:00 PM PST

This week's MS Office challenge tests your knowledge of Word and shares the answer to last week's interesting challenge on Excel date strings.

Conventions sometimes require you to enter specific information about a document in the document itself. For instance, you might need to display the file's name, the document's creation date, the number of words in the document, and so on. You can spend a lot of time entering that data manually and then updating it as needed. However, it seems like something Word should do for you. Can you get Word to insert information about the document in the document? Last week we asked… How would you convert date strings to valid date values in Excel? You provided several interesting solutions, but Tiegsj provided the answer I was looking for:

Highlight the column.
Choose Text To Columns from the Data menu.
When Excel opens the Text To Columns wizard, click Finish.

This simple solution works because the wizard automatically interprets the date strings as data values. You don't have to do a thing other than engage the wizard. Most of the other responses worked well, but couldn't handle all possible formats without a bit of extra work. The wizard can, and it takes only a few extra clicks. For instance, if the date strings are in DMY format, you have only to go a bit further with the wizard to specify that format, as shown below. Even with the extra clicks, the wizard does a quick job of converting date strings into date values.