'When concatenating date and text cell data in an Excel formula, you need to convert date cells to text to avoid unexpected results. If not, you end up with an unexpected result. Example, suppose cell H11 contained the text Due Date: and cell H12 contained a formula that calculated the date. H12 is correctly formatted for the date data type, m/d/yyyy. If you use the formula =H11&H12 to concatenate these cells, the result comes back with the serial date (such as, Due Date: 39054).

Because Excel ignores the formatting of H12, Excel returns the serial date unless the contents of H12 are converted to text before concatenating, as shown in the following formula:

=H11&TEXT(H12,\" mmmm d, yyyy\")

The correct result of this formula is Due Date: December 3, 2006.