Excel to alteryx preserve date format without conversion.

[adriancontini08]

Hello,

I have an excel file with dates in the mm/dd/yyyy format and Alteryx automatically converts them into the standard yyyy-dd-mm format while importing. Is there any way to preserve the original mm/dd/yyyy format? Mainly I want to check if the user has entered the date in mm/dd/yyyy within the workflow using a regex tool, but the date conversion is not allowing me to do that.

[BS_THE_ANALYST]

@adriancontini08 Sometimes I like to use the Autofield tool. It will automatically convert all the fields you select into their appropriate datatypes:

Can save time instead of manually changing them through the Select tool. 

If the data doesn't covert into your expected datatype (after using the Autofield tool), this provides a nice insight that you have data in that column that needs to be dealt with.

[adriancontini08]

@BS_THE_ANALYST Thanks. I believe to convert to csv, i need to do save each tab separately since csv cant have multiple sheets? That is the main hassle actually.

[apathetichell]

Hi - what's your end goal here? Data validation? Getting the output into a different format for ingestion? This seems like a lot of steps - and at its route - you should know if the user hasn't entered a date in excel if you follow @FrederikE 's suggestion. If your data is showing up as dates - everything is a date in excel. If you need to look a specific date format in excel - I'd recommend doing that in Excel vs trying to get Alteryx to control and validates Excel's internal date formatting.

[adriancontini08]

@apathetichell Got it so basically any date in date format (mm/dd/yyyy) - converted using the datenow tool in excel, will be imported as date into Alteryx (yyyy-dd-mm)? But a date in a text format whether it be mm/dd/yyyy or whatsoever will be imported as text instead of date into Alteryx?

[apathetichell]

Here's the good rule of thumb -if the entire column of Excel is stored in Excel as date - it will be imported as date. It's a date. In Alteryx this will formatted as YYYY-MM-DD (aka standard date notation). If there is even one non-null field in the import range - Alteryx will view it as text and you'll have to filter/manipulate to get it in the format you want.