Alteryx, making dating easier

[MarqueeCrew]

I've come across multiple requests for help that relate to dates.  Having to know that "2016-05-04" is the only way to get May 4th, 2016 into a date field is sometimes a challenge for new users.  When they begin to use date functions and now have to learn adding and trimming etcetera the complication factor increases.  Then we date time format and have to do all of this in English (my one and only language), makes me think that there is room for improvements.

[SeanAdams]

Absolutely agree with you @MarqueeCrew- I think that the treatment of dates is something that's a perpetual pain, and there's many areas that could be refactored in the process.   Have a look at the list of some of the suggestions so-far on this:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Refactor-Date-time-treatment/idc-p/51767#M357...

In addition to what you're saying - there are several very common date related things that we need to do frequently - like splitting dates into 3 columns; converting to different formats; etc - some of which exists in Alteryx; but it grew up in different versions at different times so the treatment of dates is very inconsistent across the various tools etc.

So - agree with you, and also think that there's probably more we can do to standardise and clean up dates more rapidly