Hannah says, how do I concatenate a date into a sentence?

Ah, glad to hear from you Hannah. And, as usual, an excellent question.
Here's the problem - if you want to produce a concatenated sentence (that's one where words or cell contents are merged together into one cell) then if you try and include a date it won't copy the date in properly.

So, for example, if I wanted to say "This quote is valid for 7 days from 12 October 2010" then I would probably try and go:
="This quote is valid for 7 days from "&L47

But it won't work - it will give a five figure serial code for the date instead of the actual date.

So, this is what you do instead:

="This quote is valid for 7 days from "&TEXT(L47,'dd mmmm yyyy')

And it'll work.

A note

• if you want the date format 12-10-10 then go 'dd-mm-yy'
• if you want the date format 12 Oct 10 then go 'dd mmm yy'

and so on.

Hannah says you don't get nothing for a pair, not in this game.

Hannah says dates in Excel are easy

Hannah says, if you want to get an updating date in Excel then it's quite similar to how it works in Access!

All you need is =now() in a cell and it'll sort out the date for you. You can format it to change what's included (Grace says you can also use =today() - but not =date() because that works differently.

You can also, just like in Access, use =now()+7 for example.

Hannah says you get the best of both worlds. Grace, otoh, says sweet niblets.