Hello PAD forum.
I am using a PAD flow to download and import PDFs containing tabular data from a government source and transfer it to Excel for cross-referencing. The plan was to use it daily to check for any additions or new entries on the PDF
Each entry in the source data has a date-time value formatted British style, i.e. DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM, or 12/11/2024 09:00 for one of yesterday's entries, for example. Each date-time value has two corresponding alphanumeric text values beside it in the table which are also imported.
The flow was working well when I wrote it a late last month -- but, unfortunately, ground to a halt this month. It appears that when I attempt to have PAD write these datetime values into Excel, some of the values are entered as text and others as datetime values. This seems to result in the the day part and the month parts being transposed, leaving me with a US-formatted date which is incorrect -- for instance, a 12 November 2024 entry was down as 12/11/2024 12:30 in the source material but comes out as 11/12/2024 12:30 when written to Excel.
It seems to be that when faced with an ambiguous date that could be valid in either US or British format, either PAD or Excel is defaulting to the US value and writing text otherwise.
I'm a little stuck, because multiple other variables rely on these date values across a wider ongoing project which involves daily flow runs.
Is there a way to get all these time-date values to consistently stick in Excel as a text value formatted British-style, as in the source material? Perhaps some way to set the data format for the column in Excel? Or maybe a way to validate and correct dates as they arise?
Any and all comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
