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Correctly Pasting Date and Time from Excel

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Joel_R_Putnam
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Hi there, I’m moving a spreadsheet to Airtable and I’m loving the extra functionality so far! Let’s just say many-to-many relationships are amazingly useful.

I’m having a surprising problem though. I’d like to paste a series of times and dates from Excel into Airtable. Right now I have the dates and times in two seperate columns, and not all records have a specific time (think of them as “all day” in google calendar land).

I’ve been able to combine the columns in excel, though not without adding a midnight time to the records without dates. Interestingly when I do this with the obvious formula (=A1+b1, etc), It first spits out either a five digit integer, or a number with five decimal places. For example, 7/22/14, 11am becomes 41842.45833. But if I convert the number format in Excel to date and time, it displays correctly.

The real weridness happens when I then try to paste that into a Date and time field in Airtable. That same date above turns into 6/14/0833 1:00am. Not so useful.

I’m hoping to copy in about 400 records, so I’d really rather not have to do this by hand. I also want to take advantage of calendar features so I’d rather not paste it all in as single line text. Any suggestions for how to get my date/time data from Excel to Airtable? Thanks!

10 Replies 10
Jeri_Vespoli
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

I had this issue as well and found through trial and error that this works:

Convert the date and time fields in excel first using the Text function for your date and time fields - Concat(Text(datefield,“dd/mm/yy”)," ",Text(timefield,“hh:mmAM/PM”)) Or, if date and time already in one field, CONCAT(TEXT(datetimefield,“mm/dd/yy hh:mmAM/PM”))

Your result should look like this: 12/17/17 10:00AM

Once formatted as dd/mm/yy hh:mmAM/PM, you can simply paste in an Airtable date field and it will keep your correct time and date.