Here we have some dates of birth. The first one is the 10th of June, 1970. I might want to change how that is formatted. So I press Control + 1, and I now get my Format Cells pop-up. Now it automatically goes to Date 'cause I've already formatted it as a date, but I can change that. I can take presets that are given here, and the alternatives are popping up in the Sample area above.

Alternatively, I might want to do this myself. So instead, again, I click on Dates, but then I click on Custom, and I scroll to the date formats that look most like those that I want. So I'm gonna start with dd-mmm, so three M's, -yy. So this will be shown as it is currently as the 10-Jun-70, or Jun, shorthand for June. We can now change these a little bit. I'm now gonna add an extra D. And if you watch what happens to the 10, it now changes to a Wed, short hand for Wednesday. If I add another D, it gives me the full Wednesday. If I take it back to the two D's, I can change the dashes to slashes.

Changing them back again.

I can change the three M's to two M's, which now changes June to 06, and I can change it to three M's, which gives me the word June in full. Lastly, we're we're looking at the Y. Y, that's just showing me 70, shorthand for 1970. Instead, I can add two extra Y's onto this, and it now shows 1970 in full. So you can play around with your custom format here. Press OK.

And if you like that format, you can then copy that format down. I'm going to copy, so Control + C. I can then select the cells I want to copy this to, and I can then Paste Special. So Control + Alt + V gets me my Paste Special up, and I can then copy formats. So I'll click on Formats there.

I can see it's a little bit too wide for one of these cells. So I'm now going to widen the cell, and it now fits in. Alternatively, what I could have done is selected my cells and then hit Control + 1, chosen the format I wanted, and when I press OK, it would've applied to all of the cells. I now want to find out what day of the week the first individual was born on. So what we can do is we can again format this cell, E6. I press Control + 1, and I now format this cell just for dddd So this will give me the day of the week written out in longhand.

I press OK, so I now hit =, I go to D6, and it now returns just the day of the week from that very useful date formatting.