Thanks for the reply. In the meantime I found a way round this - a bit laborious but it worked. I copied the columns to a Word table, and converted the table to text. Once in Word I was able to use search and replace to change the months to a numeric representation (eg 22-Feb to 22 02), then split the date into the DD and MM. The YYYY I already had so I was easily able to produce a table with the 4 columns in Word. That was then pasted back into the Excel database.