Convert text or string to date - Excel

This time I'll share Ms Excel Trick, that is how to convert text to date in Microsoft Excel. As an example we have such a text format, YYYYMMDD (20120531), we will convert the text into a date format, the formula is  = DATE (LEFT (column_name; 4), MID (column_name, 5, 2); RIGHT (column_name; 2)), as shown above. If we use formula = DATE(column_name) will display an error message "You've entered too few arguments for this function." If we use the cell format it doesn't work.Good Luck.