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I have a Google Sheets spreadsheet with a date column. A contributor to this spreadsheet keeps entering dates in invalid format. I would like to conditionally format the cells in this column to have a red background if the text cannot be interpreted to be a valid date.

How can I do this?

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It is possible to do this by using a custom formula in the conditional formatting. Assuming that you are conditional formatting the cells A1:A, enter this conditional formula:

=NOT(ISDATE(A1))
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    I believe you could further clarify on what you mean by "dates in invalid format". For example both texts like 05/12/2020 and 12/05/2020 can be read as dates. Still. Depending on the sheets locale, just one of them is correct. – marikamitsos Jul 27 '20 at 14:27
  • @marikamitsos This is what I mean: is the date in a format that Google Sheets understands? If I format the cells so that the month name automatically gets printed like this: "7 Aug 2020", will that work, or will Google Sheets fail to understand a date like "01.01.2020"? – Flimm Jul 27 '20 at 17:11
  • Well... Have you tried it? What did you find? Please edit both your question and answer including clarifications and results. Not many users make it to the comments. – marikamitsos Jul 27 '20 at 17:34

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