How to Convert Month Number to Month Name in Excel

Do you have a report in Excel that lists the months as the numbers 1 through 12 and you want to convert that into the actual month names? Below, I’ll show you how you convert a month number into a month name in Excel.

Here’s an example of data that shows monthly sales but it only lists the number as opposed to the name:

If you had the entire date in a cell you could format it so that it showed the month. For instance, what I could do is type in =TEXT(A1,”MMM”) which would convert the value in cell A1 into a three-letter abbreviation for the month. But the numbers 1 through 12 will return values of “Jan” as Excel will think that you are referring to the first month of the year.

However, that changes once you get to the number 32. Since there are only 31 days in January, the number 32 will return a value of “Feb” if you were to continue on with that formula. And so the trick is to multiply these values all by a factor of 28. Since that’s the minimum number of days every month will have, it ensures that jumping by 28 each time will put you into each month of the year. This is what my values will look like:

To prove this out, here is which dates those days of the year would correspond to:

In month 12, we barely make it in December using this approach but that’s good enough. And even in a leap year, multiplying by 28 still works. In this example, I include 2024, the next year that February gets an extra day:

So now that we’ve confirmed that those numbers will fall within the correct months, we can use the TEXT formula noted above to convert those numbers into month dates, and this is what we end up with:

You can also multiply by 29 and this logic will still work. But if you use 27 then your months will be wrong by the time you hit September and if you use a multiple of 30, then in non-leap years you will be jumping too quickly and you will have two dates in March.

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