Date in a narrow format in Excel

In Excel, you sometimes want to display dates in the top column of your table. But the date is very large and you want to have some narrow columns. Thin columns are useful if you want to put a large number of data across the screen.

The solution is to spread the day, month and year over three rows like below.

Enter the date in the top row, you will then hide the column.

in the next row, type DAY(row before), in the next row type MONTH(first row), and the last row type YEAR(first row). So you have only one number per row which allows you to go thinner.

image narrow date formatting excel

You can also put the number in a vertical format or with an angle. But it is not always nice.

For Time formatting go to Time Formatting

You can download the example of date in a thin excel column here.

A different way to have only the month or the day displayed in Excel is explained in this sheet here.