Dates and Strings

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Posted on by roberzx

Hello all,

I am hoping to find some help on this.

I have two flows. One is working successfully, while the other fails.

The flow looks for a specific date in my excel table, grabs the data and creates an email.

The flow that is successful grabs from the column arrival and later converts the string to a date with a formula. The flow that is failing is practically a mirrored flow. Both columns in the excel are formatting with the same date formatting so I don't understand why flow immediately pulls one as a date and the other as a string.

Ideally I would like both to be a string so that the flow can do the conversion.

Please let me know if there is any more information I can provide.

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Hardesh15 7,087 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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@roberzx Pls go to advance option in excel action-List row present in a table and select date format as ISO. This will automatically change your date string to a proper date.

Please 'Thumbs Up' the posts that helped you and 'Accept as Solution' if my post answered your question.

@Hardesh /Gopenly.in

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Ellis Karim 11,934 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi @roberzx ,

Please check that the DateTime Format is set to ISO 8601 in your Excel actions, for example:

(2) Can you re-apply formatting to the Excel column

Back in May 2022 I a Excel file that contained four entries that did not convert to ISO 8601 format, so I had to manually handle these. Never got to the bottom of what this was the case.

See: Easily convert Excel Dates to usable Power Automate Dates (tachytelic.net)

Ellis
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roberzx 2 on at

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Hello again,

Thank you for the replies but both flows are set up with ISO 8601. The odd thing is that "Arrival" that comes up as a string, works perfectly in the flow, as it is converted later by a formula but "Confirmation" that gets converted to a date, is the one that is having an issue, later down the flow.

The error is "The execution of template action 'Create_HTML_table' failed. The column values could not be evaluated: 'The template language function 'int' was invoked with a parameter that is not valid. The value cannot be converted to the target type.'."

Formula that seems to be working with string but not with converted date is: if(empty(item()?['CONFIRMATION']),null,addDays('1899-12-30',int(item()?['CONFIRMATION']),'MM-dd-yyyy'))

CONFIRMATION is swapped out with ARRIVAL in the other flow.
I believe this is due to the fact that it does not remain a string. As stated before, I have another flow with the same set up but looks at my "ARRIVAL" column and it works perfectly.

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