Adding Ordinal Notation to Dates

When developing a workbook, you may have a need to place suffixes such as "st, nd, rd, or th" at the end of dates, as in "9th March." Unfortunately, there is no way to do this using the built-in date formats you can apply to individual cells. You can create custom formats for each of the four suffix types, if desired, but they would have to be applied individually based on the contents of the cell itself.

The only other option is to use some sort of conversion formula. These are easy enough to put together, but the resulting cell will not contain a true Excel date, but text. This precludes the cell contents from being used in other date-related functions. The following is an example of the type of conversion formula you can use:

=DAY(A1)&IF(OR(DAY(A1)={1,2,3,21,22,23,31}),
CHOOSE(1*RIGHT(DAY(A1),1),"st","nd ","rd "),"th")
&TEXT(A1,"mmmm, yyyy")

There are others, but they all essentially do the same thing—pull the various parts of a date apart and put them back together with the proper suffix.

If you prefer, you can also create a macro function that would return a properly formatted date, with the ordinal suffix. The following is one such macro:

Function OrdinalDate(myDate As Date)
    Dim dDate As Integer
    Dim dText As String
    Dim mDate As Integer
    Dim mmmText As String

    dDate = Day(myDate)
    mDate = Month(myDate)

    Select Case dDate
        Case 1: dText = "st"
        Case 2: dText = "nd"
        Case 3: dText = "rd"
        Case 21: dText = "st"
        Case 22: dText = "nd"
        Case 23: dText = "rd"
        Case 31: dText = "st"
        Case Else: dText = "th"
    End Select

    Select Case mDate
        Case 1: mmmText = " January"
        Case 2: mmmText = " February"
        Case 3: mmmText = " March"
        Case 4: mmmText = " April"
        Case 5: mmmText = " May"
        Case 6: mmmText = " June"
        Case 7: mmmText = " July"
        Case 8: mmmText = " August"
        Case 9: mmmText = " September"
        Case 10: mmmText = " October"
        Case 11: mmmText = " November"
        Case 12: mmmText = " December"
    End Select

    OrdinalDate = dDate & dText & mmmText
End Function

You use the macro by simply invoking it within a cell formula. For example, if you have a date stored in cell B7, you can use the following in any other cell:

=OrdinalDate(B7)

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2510) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Adding Ordinal Notation to Dates.