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  • When MS Excel receives the information, it stores it as a string and not the usual “48587” format it uses to store date data.

Hello all, 

 

I have a problem sending dates to an Excel spreadsheet, which would later be used as data for a pivot table. 

I have an app that sends infos such as date and time of delivery, and I know how to format this incoming data to something Excel can understand, such as 30/11/2022 (I work from France where date formatting is different).

Problem is, when Excel receives the information, it stores it as a string and not the usual “48587” format it uses to store date data.

It eventually means that my pivot tables don’t work the way I want them to, as I can’t sort anything by dates (Excel has an option to sort by “last month”, “next week”, etc that I want to use). 

 

Bottom point is, Is there a way to make Zapier send dates data in a way Excel would recognize instantly ? like the 45848 or whatever ? 

 

Thanks a lot!

Hi @Adeliand 

 

Yes there is, you can use the Formatter by Zapier and choose the format you want there. You can use the X format if you want. 

Unfortunately it doesn’t work, because Excel has its own way of storing dates, and doesn’t understand timestamps. 

 

I found a way to work around this, by using the =DATEVALUE() function is my outgoing data. 

 

Instead of feeding Excel with raw dates, I just put the string I get from a formater straight into the formula, like so :

 

Right now it seems to do the trick, but I will have to check tomorrow if this formula returns the first of December instead of January 12th, then it would become a regional formatting problem

Nice workaround @Adeliand 👏🏽 Curious how the date appeared today, December 1? 

Amazingly, it works!

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