Customize Field type from Text to ISO Date & Time

[Grant_Wheeler]

Hi, I’ve imported a field from excel containing dates in the formate 2020-03-14 22:38:39 UTC

I’m trying to customize the field into Date in order for me to Group the dates by Year and Month.
But if I run the standard operation the field returns empty with no data in it.

Thank you in advance.

Grant

[kuovonne]

I’m not sure what you mean by “run the standard operation”.

After you imported the data from Excel, did you customize the field type to a date field?

Once the field type is set to date, you can use a formula field to identify the year and month for grouping. You can experiment with the YEAR, MONTH, and DATETIME_FORMAT functions, which are documented in the formula field reference.

[Grant_Wheeler]

Hi @kuovonne

Thank you for the reply,
Yes I tried to customize the field type to a date field but then all my data is erased from that field.

Would I use DATETIME_PARSE(date, [‘input format’], [‘locale’]) ?

[kuovonne]

Yes, if Airtable is unable to automatically convert the date string to a date type, create a new formula field using DATETIME_PARSE. Then after the formula calculates the date, convert the formula field to a date field.

[Grant_Wheeler]

Thank you I actual managed to use DATETIME_FORMAT successfully for this task. And then convert the field to date type.

Your help is much appreciated @kuovonne