I have a vector of numeric excel dates i.e.
date <- c(42963,42994,42903,42933,42964)
The output am I expecting when using
You can simply use as.Date and specify the origin, i.e.
as.Date(date, origin="1899-12-30")
#[1] "2017-08-16" "2017-09-16" "2017-06-17" "2017-07-17" "2017-08-17"
#or format it to your liking,
format(as.Date(date, origin="1899-12-30"), '%b %Y')
#[1] "Aug 2017" "Sep 2017" "Jun 2017" "Jul 2017" "Aug 2017"
This link gives quite a bit of information on this matter.