title: Need Faster way to remove leading Zero from Dates in Excel Output
body: <p>We have an internal software that exports data reports to Excel, and several of the columns contain dates in the MM/DD/YYYY format. I have a spreadsheet setup where I will copy these exported reports over to, and then I have formulas already setup to look for these dates. The problem currently is that all dates in months 1-9 come in like this: 01/22/2017.
  <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/WPAQd.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/WPAQd.png" alt="enter image description here" /></a></p>
  <p>The formulas do not recognize them until I activate each and every cell, and hit enter, and then it re-formats to: 1/22/2017 and then everything works. Currently I am having to go cell by cell and activate, and hit enter. Simply selecting all of the cells, and changing the formatting to a Date hasn't worked. Is there a faster way around this? I'm open to VBA if it works, however I'm wondering if there is a simpler method I'm missing, or simply a way to get my formulas to recognize the original date formatting.</p>
  <p>EDIT:
  The data is exported from a SQL database. The formulas that need to reference are using &lt;= in reference to week start dates on another sheet. I initially tried having those match this formatting, but because the dates come as General, math operators don't work at that point.</p>