Date changing and formatting

[Ej_1947]

Hi everyone,

I am new to designer and need help with dates. I have a column with field strings: 'January-2016', 'February-2016' going all the way to 'September-2019' Please can anyone help me with directions on how to get this string to a MM-YYYY date format e.g 'January-2016' should appear as '01-2016' formatted as a date and not a string. I tried date parse, regex and formulas and I keep getting nulls. I need the dates to function chronologically in a tableau dashboard.

Thanks in advance!

[NicholasM · Accepted solution]

Hey @Ej_1947 

I believe this can be accomplished with a series of tools. See attached workflow and photo. I took the route of changing the field to a Date datatype using the DateTime tool, this allows you to then change the date format with a formula tool.

[Ej_1947]

Thank you @NicholasM  I've just tried this and it is giving me the output '01-2016', but as a string and not in alteryx date format. Or is this not possible to get it to the date format in alteryx. I want the data type of the output '01-2016' to be a date.

[ClaireTheNovice]

Hi Ej_1947

Did you get an answer to this query? I think I need something similar.

Thanks