This seems like it should be a simple thing, but...

I have a column in Excel that has the month represented as an integer (1-12).  Ideally, I'd like to have it show the abbreviated month name (1 = Jan, 2 = Feb, etc.).

But.

If I try to change the cell formatting (like, for example, using the "mmm" mask), it changes the cell content from an integer (12) to a date (1/12/1900).  Likewise if I try to use a TEXT conversion. 

Is there a way of going from integer to month literal without using an extended IF statement?

I think you picked the one example where this does work; otherwise, not so much.  Formatting the cell this way changes the integer to a date and the "mmm" then just shows the month portion of the date.  So the integer '1' changes to '1/1/1900', which works just fine, but the integer '12' changes to '1/12/1900', which then displays as the month 'Jan'.  Not so good.

I decided to use the "choose" function, mostly because I've never used it before.  It's not as elegant as I might have wished, but it does work, so it has that going for it.

But thanks for thinking about this.

Well, for future reference, I always do this:

Highlight the cell/row/column you want the formula to work in, right click to bring up the quick menu, then choose "format cells."

From there choose the date function, and it has a lot of different options. The "14-Mar" one is the function you're looking for, I believe.

Ah, I see what you're saying. Hmmm... yes, anytime you want to keep an integer, yet display something else, you do have to resort to a formula for it.

I'll play with it for a bit, but you may have what you need there.

Of course it's important... hey now I know how to do it.

And now I'm nervous.

Quit looking at me!

I still haven't played around with it yet. I'll do that whilst I eat dinner.

I do have access to the Office dev. team via email/phone I understand. (I'd have too many choice words to say to them for a voice call.) If your way works then that's good, if there really is much of a call for it then, well, it's easy enough to file a feature request/improvement.

For those not in on the beta process and seeing the newer stuff, it should be interesting. It really should. Office 2k7 is going to take a little acclimation time but, for the most part, it does seem likely that people who use it often will speed up because of the changes. I, on the other hand, will still have to poke around until I find stuff.

Bah, he'll see it I'm sure. But will that keep them as integers?

Most excellent and, by the way, thanks and welcome to the forum. I'll bump you up over 10 posts so that you can actually be a "normal" member and post links and stuff.

We need a "that is over my head without a book" emoticon.

hehe
Thanks for the welcome!
VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is the MS Office version of VB (Visual Basic).  Simply click Alt+F11 in your Excel window and you're there.  You can create userforms, modules, class modules, etc, etc.  Some really powerful things can be created in there.  In fact, I created an Excel add-in called X-Celleration for my company.  It automates many repeatative tasks in Excel and can perform operations in seconds that would take a user hours if not days to do manually.  There are currently more than 70 functions in the program. I am considering making a commercially available version.

The rest of the MS Office suite has VBA built in as well.  Trust me, if you ever take the time to learn it, you will become addicted to it!

Want to give it a shot?  Place some regular dates (ex 1/5/07, 12/31/98, etc) in column A.  Be sure to include a column header.  Then, press Alt+F11 to open VBA.  If the Project Explorer window is not visible on the left side, activate it by going to View-->Project Explorer.  Select your workbook from the Project Explorer list and go to Insert-->Module.  In the new window, paste in this code:

Now, return to Excel and go to Tools-->Macro-->Macros.  Select ExcelToJulian from the popup list and click Run.

Might seem like a lot of work for something so simple, but this one code gets ran over 100 times a day in my company, normally on worksheets containing 20000-30000 records.  Also, my program actually adds a menu to Excel, so you don't have to go through all the hoops to run the program.