DATEVALUE() - Convert text values to dates

Sometimes we have values on our sheets that are stored as text (strings) and we need to convert them to date format. For this we can use the DATEVALUE() function. The syntax for this function is:

DATEVALUE(date_text)

date_text argument is a text string.

This function can convert various types of strings. Here are some samples:

DATEVALUE("15MAR") will return 15-03-2009
DATEVALUE("MAR09") will return 01-03-2009
DATEVALUE("15/3") will return 15-03-2009
DATEVALUE("1-MAR") will return 01-03-2009