To turn a date into text, use the TEXT function with a format code as the second argument: =TEXT(A1,"dd-mmm-yyyy") gives 15-Jan-2026, =TEXT(A1,"mmmm") gives January, and =TEXT(A1,"dddd") gives Thursday. The format code goes in double quotes and controls exactly how the date reads — d/dd for the day number, ddd/dddd for the day name, mmm/mmmm for the month, and yy/yyyy for the year.
Join the pieces with & to build a sentence: ="Due on "&TEXT(A1,"dddd, d mmmm yyyy"). The important consequence is that the result is genuinely text, not a date — it can’t be sorted chronologically, filtered by date, or used in any date calculation, and a column of TEXT results will sort April before January.
So use it for labels, reports, and concatenated strings, and if you only want the date to look different while staying a real date, apply a custom cell format instead (Ctrl+1 → Custom), which changes the display and leaves the underlying value intact.
As you know, Excel stores a date as a number, and you have the date format on the cell to show it as a date. By converting the date into a text, you can get the day name, day number, month name, and year number.
For this, the best way is to use the TEXT function. This function allows you to extract a part (day, month, and year) from a date as a text. In this tutorial, we will look at a few examples to understand to use this method.
Convert a Date into Text using the TEXT Function
You can use the below steps:
- First, enter the TEXT function in a cell.
- After that, in the first argument, refer to the original date.
- Next, in the third argument, enter the format of the date that you want to get in the result.
- In the end, enter closing parentheses and hit enter to get the result.
=TEXT(A1,"dd-mmm-yy")Get Month Name as a Text from a Date
In the TEXT function, you need to refer to the actual date in the first argument, and then in the second argument, you need to specify the format of the date that you want to get in the result.
In this formula, we have used the format “MMMM”. This format tells the TEXT function to only get the full month name from the date as a text.
=TEXT(A1,"MMMM")And if you want to get the short month name you just need to change the format from “MMMM” to “MMM”.
=TEXT(A1,"MMM")Get Day Name as a Text from a Date
And if you want to get the day name as a text from the date, you need to use the same function i.e. TEXT.
Here you have used the same function with the format to get the full-day name.
=TEXT(A1,"DDDD")To get the short-day name, you can use the following formula.
=TEXT(A1,"DDD")
Get a Date in a Complete Text Sentence
In the below formula, we have used the TEXT function to create a text sentence to define the date and day name in long sentence form.
="The date is "&TEXT(A1,"DD, MMMM'YY")&" and day is "&TEXT(A1,"DDDD")&"."
Written by
Puneet Gogia
Microsoft MVP — Excel · Founder, Excel Champs
Twelve years of teaching Excel, and a decade before that using it as a data analyst. Every tutorial here is written from a file I actually built.