Google Sheets: How to Convert Dates to Strings

You can use the following formulas to convert a date to a string in Google Sheets:

Method 1: Convert Date to String

=TEXT(A1, "mm-dd-yyyy")

Method 2: Convert Datetime to String

=TEXT(A1,"yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss")

The following examples show how to use these formulas in practice.

Suppose we have the following list of dates in Google Sheets:

We can use the following formula to convert the date in cell A1 to a string:

=TEXT(A1, "mm-dd-yyyy")

We can then copy and paste this formula down to the remaining cells in column B:

All of the cells in column B are now a string.

To verify this, we can type =ISTEXT(A2) and =ISTEXT(B2) to check if the values in cells A2 and B2 are strings, respectively:

We can see that the value in cell A2 is not a string since the ISTEXT() function returned FALSE.

Conversely, we can see that the value in cell B2 is a string since the ISTEXT() function returned TRUE.

Suppose we have the following list of datetimes in Google Sheets:

We can use the following formula to convert the datetime in cell A1 to a string:

=TEXT(A1,"yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss")

We can then copy and paste this formula down to the remaining cells in column B:

All of the cells in column B are now a string.

To verify this, we can type =ISTEXT(A2) and =ISTEXT(B2) to check if the values in cells A2 and B2 are strings, respectively:

We can see that the value in cell A2 is not a string since the ISTEXT() function returned FALSE.

Conversely, we can see that the value in cell B2 is a string since the ISTEXT() function returned TRUE.

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

Published by Zach