Date format for Excel

(0) Share

Report

Posted on by Gatchaman

Hello,

I am working on my first app wich is a simple form validation with Excel as a data source.

I am having issues with one of the date format and oddly enough I have another that works fine!

Here is the issue

Power Apps sends and ISO 8601 date to Excel but Excel then reads it

2022-01-19T23:00:00.000Z

not only adding an unwanted timestamp and zone but also using utc timezone and substracting 1hr to my day pulling it to the day before!

It seems I am far from the first to encounter that issue and I have been roaming the forums from thread to thread, but while I more or less understand what causes the issue I have yet to find a working solution.

I have tried many configurations without success (the fact that I am a newbie does not help!)

I saw on another similar topic a solution that I tried to apply

Here is my card

And the datepicker setting in it

I understand the idea was to force a date and time to Excel to have it display the proper format wich for my need is dd/mm/yyyy

If you have any suggestion or even better a solution it would be greatly appreciated as I have been stuck on this long enough!

The other thing I don't quite understand to my ever boiling frustrastion is why one field works as intended and not the other!

Anyway sorry to make yet another topic on the subject, but I'll be sure to share any solution I find working for future peolple with that issue!

Categories:

Building Power Apps

I have the same question (0)

All responses (4)

Answers (1)

Sort by

Gatchaman 21 on at

Like
a
(0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

So to add a little to the excitement.
From what I understood Excel reads both columns as text but when imported in PowerApps one is seen as datefield and the other as plain text (wich seem to be working fine)
I don't really understand why because in the excel the columns are similar in configuration.
But maybe there is a key here to solve this issue. Maybe if there is a way to force power apps to see this field as a text string rather than a date it would send the datpicker data as a text too. solving the problem.

Anyway, any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
v-jefferni Microsoft Employee on at

Like
a
(0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Hi @Gatchaman ,

Any time when you need to use tables from in Excel spreadsheets as the data source of Power Apps, please make sure date columns have already be converted to text type. You could work in Excel to copy date columns and paste them as plain text to text columns, then this table is ready to use. Besides, please be aware that calculated columns are not supported to use in Power Apps.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Community Support Team _ Jeffer Ni
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Gatchaman 21 on at

Like
a
(0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Hello,
First thank you so much for taking the time!
I'm getting desperate here!
The thing is I am "almost" certain it's already in text format
A friend gave me an Excel formula to convert that ISO 8601 into dd/mm/yyyy it goes like this:
=STXT(L150;9;2)&"/"&STXT(L150!;6;2)&"/"&(GAUCHE(L150!;4))
it would only work if the cell was in text format.
But like I say in my second post I suspect that column is in date format. In wich case I'm at a bit of a loss.
I'm not sure how I can force an Excel column into a format.
And as the file is not mine to change (I just build the app around it) I would rather try to fix my issue without altering it.

Thank you for your time @v-jefferni

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Verified answer

Gatchaman 21 on at

Like
a
(0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Well,
I found a roundabout to my issue (a little while back, forgot to post it here).
Instead of sending the data directly from the powerApps form with submitForm, I use a flow triggered from onSelect of the button.
The flow picks string data (and values from select) and feed them with the add a line of the Excel connector.

Flows seem to be the answer for all those compatibility issues beteween PowerApps and Excel.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No