Alteryx recognizes dates in one input file but not the other

[Travis_Ratliff]

Hello

I built a workflow to format my data for one of my reports. In my input file I have a column for dates dd-Mon-yy, as seen in the first screen shot, which Alteryx is converting to dd-Mon-yyyy format, as seen in second screenshot. But when I used last years data to test the workflow Alteryx didn't convert the dates, as seen in third and fourth screenshot. This is causing the workflow to fail because I am joining on this field. 

Any ideas as to why it is changing some dates but not others?

 

 

 

[Prometheus]

@Travis_Ratliff I think your best bet is to convert your date field to ISO dates, which Alteryx recognizes as dates. Then you can specify how you want the workflow to output that date field in the end. That way you won't have to worry about whether or not the date values were converted.

[Travis_Ratliff]

@Prometheus Do you mean convert it before the workflow? If you mean converting in the workflow first how would I do that if they are in potentially two different formats?

[Prometheus]

@Travis_Ratliff I meant in the workflow. If you would upload just the date fields in these two datasets, I would be able to provide a more practical solution. My guess is that although the dates appear a certain way in Excel, it doesn't mean that they're actually formatted that way. For instance, if you type 2023-10-26 into Excel, it'll convert it to 10/26/2023.

[Travis_Ratliff]

@Prometheus See attached for the two date fields.

[Prometheus]

@Travis_Ratliff Interestingly enough, there's no difference between the two fields. In this workflow I created with your dataset, you can see in the Select tools that Alteryx recognizes each field immediately as a Date data type, so you wouldn't get the different outputs that you're getting above.