How to get Excel to recognize a date field produced by Alteryx as a date?

Question

Regardless of how I've formatted a Date field (yyyy-mm-dd or mm/dd/yy) or if I've changed a field's type to Date in Alteryx, when I open the output Excel file, Excel doesn't recognize the records in that field as a date, and I must manually convert the records in the Date field to Date format. How do I configure the data in Alteryx in a way that Excel can read it as a date?

danielregan83 · Answer

Thank you, @binu_acs and @Qiu. You both are correct, but that only works if you're outputting via an output data tool. When I use the table/render tools to output a date as a string (col. 1 in attached file) or a date as a date (col. 2 in attached file), Excel doesn't recognize either as a date. Is there any way around this?

If there isn't a way around this using the table/render tools, is there a way to parse out data into multiple sheets in the same Excel file using an output data tool and a certain field in the dataset to parse it out? I'm currently using a table tool to group each data stream by the parsing field, combining the tables, and adding a layout and render tool to output the data based on Layout. Is there a way to do this without using table/layout/render tools?

Test.xlsx

Qiu · Answer

@binu_acs 
How did you manage to show the Data Type bar next your Formula bar in Excel? 😁

Qiu · Answer

@danielregan83 
I have run simple test and it seems that Excel would recognize the Date format if it is in yyyy-mm-dd  format.

0928-danielregan83.yxzp