You'll notice that Excel recognizes some of the dates but for most it won't. You'll see the dates that Excel has recognized as right-aligned cells and those it didn't recognize, and assumed was text, as left-aligned cells. If you look closely you'll see that even the cells Excel did recognize as dates are wrong - the months and days are switched.
It can be quite a task to fix all of these dates. In the early days I tried various techniques to solve this problem, but all of them were time consuming. Then I discovered a simple little trick using Excel's 'Text to columns' option.
Here's what you can do...
1.Highlight the cells (only one column wide) containing the dates. You can select the entire column if you like.
2.From the Data menu, select 'Text to columns'
3.In the dialog box, select the 'Fixed width' option and click the Next button
4.If there are any column break lines (vertical lines with arrows) through the data area, double-click on them to remove them all. Then click the Next button
5.In the 'Column data format' section, select MDY (or whichever date format you need) from the Date dropdown. This tells Excel the format of the imported dates.
6.Click the Finish button.
http://www.theexceladdict.com/_t/t040519.htm
I think it is more of an ongoing excel issue than MS Geezer.