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Question

Converting date in text to actual date

  • October 31, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 76 views
R

Moderator note (January 15, 2026): The Google Tables app mentioned in this post is no longer integrated with Zapier. Google sunset their Google Tables product on December 16, 2025. You can learn more about that here: Google Tables Beta Update & FAQ. 

I created a Zap to make a starred Gmail into a row in a Google Tables table that I created. The date is a text field, in the format: Tue, 25 Oct 2022 16:57:27 -0400 (EDT). So the coumn sorts in alphabetical order rather than chronologically in the table.  Looking for ideas to fix this - probably with a new column and a bot.
 
Thanks in advance
This post has been closed for comments. Please create a new post if you need help or have a question about this topic.

1 reply

Danvers
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  • DanversZapier Staff
  • Zapier Staff
  • October 31, 2022

Hi @RustyRover!

Getting Google Sheets to use the right format can be tricky. The first thing I would recommend is to change the format in the Sheet. To do that:

Highlight the column

Click ‘Format’ in the menu and select the date format that you’d like:

 

If you’d like to change the format of the information before it’s passed to Google Sheets, you can use Formatter by Zapier to do that. You need to add a Formatter step before the Google Sheets step and select the ‘Data/time’ option. Then select the option to convert the date and choose the format to which you’d like to change the date from Gmail. When you test the Formatter step, you’ll see that it’s changed the date to the format that you need. From there, use the output of the Formatter step in the Google Sheets step and you should be good to go!

 

Let us know if you have any questions!

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