Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here: Unique Military Date Format.

Unique Military Date Format

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated September 4, 2021)
This tip applies to Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003


For some purposes, the military uses a variation of what is called a "Julian date" to record a specific date. This special date format consists of the year digits followed by the absolute day of the year. Thus, 9 July 2013 would end up as 13190. This shows the year (13, which is for 2013) followed by the 190th day of the year (July 9).

The military is not alone in its use of such dates. Some other industries also rely on this type of date format. Excel, however, doesn't rely on this type of format. Instead, it uses more common formatting for the display of dates, and its own serial number format for the internal storage of dates. If you need to work with the Julian dates (perhaps you are in the military), you may wonder if there is a way to format dates in this manner.

The short answer is that there is no native way to do it. The custom formatting capabilities of Excel don't allow you to indicate a way to display the day of the year. So this means that you must use a formula to return either a numeric value for the Julian date, or a text string that contains the Julian date.

If you want to return a text string containing the formatted date, then you can use a formula such as the following:

=RIGHT(YEAR(A1),2)&(A1-DATE(YEAR(A1),1,1)+1)

This formula assumes that cell A1 contains a regular Excel date. The first part of the formula (the part before the ampersand) returns the last digit of the year and the part after the ampersand subtracts the first day of the current year from the date being converted, and then adds 1 back to that date. The result is the ordinal day within the year.

If the day-of-the-year portion of the Julian date must always be three digits, then you need to modify the formula just a bit more. As written above, the formula will return 1, 2, or 3 digits for the last part of the formula. If it always needs to be 3, then use this, instead:

=RIGHT(YEAR(A1),2)&RIGHT("000"&(A1-DATE(YEAR(A1),1,1)+1),3)

If you prefer to have the formula return a number rather than a text string, you could enclose the entire formula within a VALUE function, or you could simply multiply the year digit by 1000 in the formula. Both approaches are shown here:

=VALUE(RIGHT(YEAR(A1),2)&RIGHT("000"&(A1-DATE(YEAR(A1),1,1)+1),3))
=RIGHT(YEAR(A1),1)*1000+(A1-DATE(YEAR(A1),1,1)+1)

You can also find information on working with Julian dates in Microsoft's Knowledge Base:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214099

This article indicates it is for Excel 2000, but the formulas it presents work well in other versions of Excel as well. There is also additional information available on Chip Pearson's Web site:

http://www.cpearson.com/excel/jdates.htm

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (3227) 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: Unique Military Date Format.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

MORE FROM ALLEN

Enlarging Screen Font Size

Sometimes things appearing on the screen are a bit too small to read easily. One possible solution is to adjust the size ...

Discover More

Finding Differences Between Lists

A common task faced by Excel users is to determine whether items in one list are also found in a different list. There ...

Discover More

Finding and Replacing when Only a Portion of the Text is Superscripted

Finding and replacing text when the text being searched for has mixed formatting can be a challenge. You may, however, ...

Discover More

Program Successfully in Excel! This guide will provide you with all the information you need to automate any task in Excel and save time and effort. Learn how to extend Excel's functionality with VBA to create solutions not possible with the standard features. Includes latest information for Excel 2024 and Microsoft 365. Check out Mastering Excel VBA Programming today!

More ExcelTips (menu)

Days Left in the Year

Sometimes it is handy to know how many days are left in the current year. This tip provides a quick formula that ...

Discover More

Alerts About Approaching Due Dates

You may use Excel to track due dates for a variety of purposes. As a due date approaches, you may want that fact drawn to ...

Discover More

Calculating Week-Ending Dates

When working with dates, you may need to figure out all the dates on which weeks end in a given year. There are several ...

Discover More
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

View most recent newsletter.

Comments

If you would like to add an image to your comment (not an avatar, but an image to help in making the point of your comment), include the characters [{fig}] (all 7 characters, in the sequence shown) in your comment text. You’ll be prompted to upload your image when you submit the comment. Maximum image size is 6Mpixels. Images larger than 600px wide or 1000px tall will be reduced. Up to three images may be included in a comment. All images are subject to review. Commenting privileges may be curtailed if inappropriate images are posted.

What is 9 + 7?

There are currently no comments for this tip. (Be the first to leave your comment—just use the simple form above!)


This Site

Got a version of Excel that uses the menu interface (Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, or Excel 2003)? This site is for you! If you use a later version of Excel, visit our ExcelTips site focusing on the ribbon interface.

Newest Tips
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

(Your e-mail address is not shared with anyone, ever.)

View the most recent newsletter.