Create a Combined Excel Column Given Month and Year

If I've been given a year (ex 1980) and a month (January) - how could I create a new column in excel to show a combined date - such as Jan-80?

The date function doesn't work since it requires a day and one has not been provided for this example.

Tried the date function and it did not work given requirement for a day value.

try this

=TEXT(DATE(A1, MONTH(DATEVALUE(B1 & " 1")), 1), "mmm-yy")

The DATE function puts together the year, month number, and a set day (1). Then, the TEXT function changes the date format to "mmm-yy". Here, "mmm" means the short month name, and "yy" means the two-number year.

You can take advantage of how Excel casts strings as dates, based on your local/time settings. Assuming you have the month in cell A1 and the year in cell B1:

=0+("1-"&A1&"-"&B1)

Note: later I found out that the dash delimiter (-), at least for my local time/settings) is not really needed and some parenthesis, as well as the day one can be a number:

=0+1&A1:A2&B1:B2

The output is a date type (number), then you can format it in a date format of your preference or use the TEXT function:

=TEXT(0+("1-"&A1&"-"&B1),"mmm-yy")

Here is the output:

where 29221 is the numeric representation of the date: 1-Jan-1980. As you can see it works in array form, so you can convert a range using a similar approach. The following also works: 0+TEXTJOIN("-",,"1",A1,B1) but not for a range, you need to drag it down.

Here is the output after applying TEXT function: