When entering dates and times together into a cell in Excel, they will display in a standardized format showing both pieces of information.
However, you may need to break apart the date and time into separate cells for easier analysis or formatting. Luckily, Excel offers a couple handy methods to separate date and time – you can leverage either built-in functions or custom cell formatting to extract just the date or just the time into its own column or row.
How to Separate Date and Time in Excel
There are a few different ways you can separate out the date and time into different columns or cells in Excel.
One easy option is to use the TEXT function. The TEXT function lets you pull out just a part of a full date and time stamp. You would type =TEXT(A2,”mm/dd/yyyy”) to extract only the date part. Or you could use =TEXT(A2,”h:mm AM/PM”) to pull out only the time portion.
Another choice is using the DATE and TIME functions together. The DATE function will let you pull out the year, month and day from the cell with the full timestamp. Then the TIME function will grab the hour, minute and second only. So you get each part separated.
A third method is using the Text to Columns command. You would first select the cells that have the full date and time stamps. Go to the Data tab and click on Text to Columns. When the wizard opens, choose Delimited and click Next. Then select Date for one column and Time for the other column. This splits them for you automatically.
The last option is using Flash Fill in Excel. To try this, enter the date format you want into the column next to the full timestamps. Then click on the bottom cell in the column and start typing in the time format. Excel will automatically separate and fill down the dates and times into the different columns by recognizing the patterns.
