[Gecko2954]

I have a number sequence that is back to front & want to represent this in the standard European format e.g..
2009-08-24 should be 24/08/2009
There are several thousand date records to change

How do I do this?

[ScottGem]

Are the cells formatted as dates or text?

[JBeaucaire]

If the cells are already formatted as date, you can simply highlight the cells and press CTRL-1 to open the cell formatting wizard and apply a Date format of your choosing.

If the cells are text strings, you can convert them to date strings with a simple trick:

1) Highlight the date cells in a single column
2) Select Data > Text To Columns > Delimited > Next > Next
3) On the 3rd screen of the wizard, click on DATE: YMD in the upper right corner
4) Click OK

The cells now have standard date strings in them and you format the cells to display any way you wish.

[Gecko2954]

The Date is a number sequence without separation characters e.g.. 20051025 = 25 Oct 2005

[ScottGem]

In that case use the STR() function to convert to a string and then use the Mid function to parse out the components.

[JBeaucaire]

Actually, the trick proposed in post #3 will work on text strings like this, too. Just pick YMD so Excel knows how to evaluate the string.