Obtaining 3 month character representation of the month in Excel

Posting this for others and for myself in case I forget the next time I need to use it.

I'm trying to take a date in Excel and turn it into a 3 character representation.  I know how to do that using TSQL but others I work with that don't have access to TSQL tools and don't know how to script can also do some data formatting on their own.

I inserted the date...

3/18/2016

...in cell A1. In B1, I inserted what I thought the function would be but it didn't work...

=MONTH(A1)

This formula gave me a 3 in return instead of Mar. I was 99% sure that Excel had to have a function for this so after doing a Google search, I found what I was after and more.

 There was a post that stated to use this formula...

=TEXT(MONTH(A1),"MMM")

...but that gave me Jan in return which is not good because the date I keyed in was March. I found an explanation of what that combination of functions did. 

Using MONTH() only returns a number 1 through 12 depending on what date is in the cell. If you type in 1 in cell A1, 2 in A2 and all the way down to 12 in A12, convert that column to a date and you'll see that those are the first 12 dates in January of the year 1900.

If you have a number that includes or is between 1 through 12 in this formula...

=TEXT(6,"MMM")

...it's always going to return Jan as the month.  The fastest way to get the 3 character representation of month is just to use the TEXT() function and not the MONTH() function.

=TEXT(A1,"MMM")

Typing that function into cell A2 when the date (3/18/2016 for example) is in A1 will give...

Mar

After doing my Google search, it came to me that if I right clicked on a column that has dates, click on Format Cells... click on Custom, and then in the Type: field type MMM, that would give you the same result.