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Incorrect Date When Bulk Uploading to Microsoft Planner

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Posted on by BNelson08

Hi all,

To summarize my goal: I want to be able to create tasks, buckets, start date, due date and other variables in Excel and import successfully to Planner.

To summarize my issue: When importing this spreadsheet, the date is incorrect and shows as one (1) day prior.

Please see below for additional details.

I've created the below flow that while it runs successfully, the dates are always imported one (1) day before the required date:

Power Automate Flow.png

For the 'Start Date Time,' and 'Due Date Time,' shown above, I have used the below formula:

formatDateTime('3-09-2022', 'M/dd/yyyy')

I've also used the values listed in the Start Date and Due Date columns in my spreadsheet. These dates have been formatted as both general (see below for more information) and date format.

I've used other formats, including: MM/dd/yyyy.

Additionally, I've set the DateTime Format in the 'List rows present in a table' Excel command to both ISO 8601 and Serial (and changed the corresponding cell format in the source Excel sheet to general resulting in a serial number of 44629 from a date of 3/9/2022). Neither has resulted in the correct date, 3/9/2022, being imported.

When uploaded to Planner, the date always shows as one day prior, 3/8/2022.

This presents an issue as when I attempt to use other connector templates available via Power Automate such as: Post a daily message to Microsoft Teams with Planner tasks due tomorrow and Create a daily summary of Planner Tasks by Bucket, as the dates in both of these flows are always incorrect. Additionally, I need to manually correct these dates, circumventing the purpose for using Power Automate.

Any and all guidance would be greatly appreciated as I have yet to find my answer in this community or via external sources.

Please let me know if any additional information is required.

Thank you!

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Building flows

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jedunn 123 Microsoft Employee on at

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Are you sure you are actually extracting a date and not a serial number from the workbook? If you add a compose step to your flow and insert your date there you might see something like below. I could be wrong but I think the serial number needs to be converted to a real date on insertion into planner.

Here's a post explaining a common conversion expression: Convert excel numerical dates to date MS FLOW

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BNelson08 4 on at

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Thanks for your reply.

I added the compose step as suggested and confirmed that I am extracting a date and not a serial number:
As I've tried both as a serial number and date, I'm open to any other suggestions as the flow is otherwise running successfully.

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christine_ctm 10 on at

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I'm having this exact same problem with the same outcome as above.

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jedunn 123 Microsoft Employee on at

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Thank you both for your patience. I clearly didn't follow the original post closely enough. While I don't know what is causing the issue, I do have a couple questions. Are you seeing a difference between the date as extracted from the workbook and the date written into planner? In other words, does the flow run page list a date different from what is actually inserted into planner?

I'll start looking for a way to log this a bug with the product team. Thank you!

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christine_ctm 10 on at

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I found a solution to this problem.... here is the source of the solution

Correct expression for date field. addDays(item()?['Due Date'],1)
'Due date' will be the name of the date field in your Excel import.

My flow

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BNelson008 8 on at

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You're welcome and thanks for the assistance. As an aside, this is still BNelson08, however for some reason, I was prompted to create a new username and could not access this post until I did.

I am not seeing a material difference in the date from the Excel Spreadsheet and the date as written in Planner.

As shown in Excel (Note - I am only using the field 'Start Date')*:
*While the Excel formatting can simply be a column with the respective names of each category I need, I exported this spreadsheet from Planner and edited to minimize variables.

As shown in Planner:
As shown in Planner (expanded view when Task is selected):
As mentioned above, my formula as written is: formatDateTime('3-09-2022', 'M/dd/yyyy')

I have tried other formats, including MM/dd/yyyy and yyyy-MM-dd.

Is there any issue with using dashes (-) and slashes (/) interchangeably?

Thanks!

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BNelson008 8 on at

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Thank you.

I tried this method and interestingly enough, it worked the first time and now I cannot change the date.

Specifically, I tried this with my original date of 3/9/22 successfully. Upon subsequent tests, when changing the date to 3/11/22, the date remains on 3/9/22.

The Due Date is the same formula with the string updated to 'Due Date'.

As shown in Planner (I ran the flow twice):

The dates as shown in Excel:
I'm going to continue to test and will update however the link you provided is quite helpful and the time zone element makes sense.

Thank you!

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jedunn 123 Microsoft Employee on at

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@christine_ctm thanks for posting that solution. Today I learned that Power Automate will default a date to zero hours if not given a time!

@BNelson008 Good luck testing and troubleshooting.

Working with dates across services is challenging.

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BNelson008 8 on at

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Thanks again to both of you for your help.

@christine_ctm - The solution you posted did/does work. The error I faced was due to an incorrect file location.

It does however, present a downstream error: Power Automate flows based on this date are/can be incorrect.

For example, if using the Power Automate template 'Create a daily summary of Planner Tasks by Bucket,' the date now shows as one (1) day ahead.

As shown in the email produced by the above template (The due date in this example is/should be 3/11/22):
As evidenced by the screenshot, the due date shown is now 3/12/22.

@jedunn - Please let me know if I should open a new thread for this issue or if this is something that may be escalated to the product team.

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jedunn 123 Microsoft Employee on at

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I am pursuing this with the product team. Dates should not need to be coerced into the results you expect in different contexts. They should work by default on insertion or at minimum have links to some helpful tips.

No need to create a new issue.

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