Making Excel Recognize Custom Day/Time Format

Question

I'm working with a date and time format from the Twitter API. It looks like this:

Tue Nov 26 20:44:15 +0000 2013

Is there a formula to convert this to a format that could be sorted chronologically? I don't need the +0000. Also not concerned about the day of week.

Answer 1

=DATEVALUE(MID(A1,9,3) & MID(A1,4,5) & RIGHT(A1,4)) + TIMEVALUE(MID(A1,11,9))

Then format as you like. As requested you would want a Custom Format of mmm dd HH:mm yyyy

Answer 2

Try this, assuming that your string is in A1:

=DATETIME(MID(A1, 5, 16) & MID(A1, 27, 4))

The two MID formulas cut out the parts of the string you want, namely the month, day, time, and year, but exclude the day of the week and the timezone. This produces a string that the DATETIME function can automatically recognize and covert into a native Excel date format.