Excel not recognizing date and time as number

Solution Verified: The issue was my windows regional settings. It was set to UK time and these date formats below are in US. I changed my region settings, restarted excel, and excel recognized it as numbers once I changed the format of the cells to date.

I have to calculate elapsed time between two dates and time.

For example:

Time elapsed between 1/20/2026 13:53 and 2/4/2026 11:29

In this case it is m/d/yyyy hh:mm

I need to know elapsed time in days, hours, and minutes

I wasn't able to export these dates/times from the system we use, so I had to copy and paste them into excel. As a result, Excel is unable to recognize the date/time format as a number and I cannot do any calculations on it.

I have tried the following:

- I tried the convert text to column feature and choose delimited on the whole column, deselect delimiters, and set the format to date (MDY). However when I do finish it doesn't do anything. It only works if I get rid of the time in the cell (for example if I just put 1/20/2026).

- Change the format to custom format (m/d/yyyy h:mm), but this doesn't seem to do anything either.

- Note if I go to Date and try to find the 3/14/12 1:30 PM format, it does not show in my list.

How can I get excel to recognize it as a number with both the day and time in the cell?