(gentle music)
- [Instructor] All right, if you're using Google Sheets,
you may have a list of dates like we have here.
And you wanna just show the month.
Do you want to show it as text?
So for example, in this, so for example,
this cell, you just want to show
the word August, May, February.
We're going to go over two different techniques to do that,
and each one of them will be quite different.
But the first one is just to change the formatting.
All right, so we will highlight all five of these
and just go up to the format menu.
And dates are really just numbers,
so go to the Number category,
and then come all the way down
and we're going to do custom date and time.
Left-click on that, you get this menu that comes up.
And at the top, you can see the three components of a date.
So there's no time on this date.
So you only have day, month and year.
And we're going to click just to the right of the day,
so you get the blinking cursor,
and we're going to backspace over day,
backspace over the dash.
We're going to leave the month in there,
and go to the left and get rid of the year.
Now, you can see the month is the only thing left.
And in the parentheses, you can see how it's going
to be displayed.
So if I just clicked apply right now,
it'd be displayed as a 08.
We'll left-click on this.
There was 08.
We can go to the shortened version of the month,
but we are just going to do the full name of the month.
So click on that, press Apply.
And all of these values have changed
to be just displayed as the day of the month.
Now, if you double-click in any of these,
I'll hit the escape key, or you just look up in the formula,
you can see there's still a date value.
So there's some implications of this
as you can still add one to it.
It's going to increment to the next day,
but it would still show as February.
So this is just formatting.
It's not changing the values.
And if that's what you want to do,
then you're done at this point.
But let's go down to this next set of data,
and we'll do something a little bit different on these.
And we'll actually get this next row,
and tuck them up a little bit higher
just to show that it works no matter what the format is,
as long as it's a valid date.
And what we'll do here is we're going to extract the day
of the month, and put it in another column.
It's going to leave the source date here intact,
leave it like it is,
but then somewhere else, you can show what the month is.
So we're going to do that with the text function.
And the text function's going to format this date as text.
So we'll talk about what that means in a minute.
First, we will grab the number.
So it's in A7.
And then we'll use a comma.
And when I say use a comma, that's right for most countries,
but if you are in a country that uses a comma
as a decimal separator,
you're going to want to use a semicolon.
I never remember to say that in my videos,
but I get questions about it from time to time.
It's usually commas, but if the commas aren't working,
try a semicolon.
But moving on.
So the trick to the text function
is telling it what format you want the date in.
So we looked at this a a bit before when we were doing
the custom formatting,
but let's start out with a quote first.
But then what we looked at was one M.
That's just going to give us, in this case, a six.
Two of them will be 06.
This will be the short version of the month,
a long version of the month, and that's what we want.
So we will end this with another quote in parentheses
and hit enter.
And this is writing the name of the day of the month.
We'll click the check mark here to accept the autofill
because we do want it to go all the way down.
Oh, look at that.
They want me to send feedback.
My feedback would be it's kind of helpful,
but it also pops up and is distracting in my videos.
But there's one thing to keep in mind here.
So we have the word June.
If we had done this with the previous method,
this would still be the entire date,
and it would be a number.
But here, if I use the ISNUMBER function
to check to see if it is a number.
Close it off.
It's not anymore.
So that may be good.
If you're not doing any math with this,
you're not adding a day or increment in it the next year,
it's fine that it's text,
but just keep in mind that it converts
the data type of what's in the source cell to text.
And if you're a spreadsheet lover,
that may have peaked your curiosity
to learn more about data types.
So there's number, there's text.
We've talked about both of those,
but there's also other data type
that you'll run into in spreadsheets.
In this next video, we'll go over all of them,
how to tell them apart,
and how to work with them in your spreadsheet.
I'll see you in that next video, and thanks for watching.
It's nice to have you along.