How to Concatenate Dates in Google Sheets


When using the CONCATENATE function, Google Sheets will automatically convert dates to numeric values.

However, you use the TEXT function to specify that the date should remain formatted as a date:

=CONCATENATE(A2, TEXT(B2, "M/DD/YYYY"))

This particular formula will concatenate the strings in cells A2 and B2 and keep the date in cell B2 formatted as a date with a M/DD/YYYY format.

The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.

Example: Concatenate Dates in Google Sheets

Suppose we have the following dataset in Google Sheets that contains information about the start date for various employees at some company:

If we use the following CONCATENATE function to create a string that describes when each employee started working, each of the dates in column B will be converted to numeric values by default:

=CONCATENATE(A2, " started working on ", B2)

Notice that each of the dates have been converted to numeric values by default.

To concatenate the cells and keep the dates in column B formatted as dates, we can instead use the following formula:

=CONCATENATE(A2, " started working on ", TEXT(B2, "M/DD/YYYY"))

Google Sheets concatenate dates

By using the TEXT function within the CONCATENATE function, we are able to concatenate the employee names and the dates while keeping the dates in the correct format.

Also note that M/DD/YYYY is only one date format option we could have used.

For example, we could instead use MMM YYYY to only display the month and year:

=CONCATENATE(A2, " started working on ", TEXT(B2, "MMM YYYY"))

Refer to the Google Sheets documentation for a complete list of available date formats you can use.

Additional Resources

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Google Sheets:

How to Remove Substring in Google Sheets
How to Extract Numbers from String in Google Sheets
How to Convert Dates to Strings in Google Sheets

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