How do you import date fields from excel?

[#1]

I've been sifting through the Importing articles on the wiki, and trying various settings, but I'm still not having any luck. I want to import a number of tasts and set the Opened date field.

In excel, I've tried using various date formats, the General cell format, and the apostrophe ' prefix in the cell. Whenever I run the import it sets it to a random date like year 0099 AD etc.

[bburdick]

Going to hold off on that for a bit then. We are looking at implementing LDAP Integration which I hope eliminates the need for this transform map we are using today.

[rgarland]

Something else I just noticed in your error. It is saying 'Unable to format 01/09/2012...." In your spreadsheet, you need to make sure your date field is formatted as 'mm-dd-yyyy' and not 'mm/dd/yyyy'. We did that with a Custom Category/Type format.

[bburdick]

Ugh! That was it. Some times it pays to be literal. Thanks rgarland. All I had to do was write a little transform script so I could convert the '/' to a '-' and modify the file type format and it worked fine. The way I get the field doesn't allow me to request they use '-'. But with the little transform script it works sweet!!

var month = source.u_hire_date.split('/')[0];
var day = source.u_hire_date.split('/')[1];
var year = source.u_hire_date.split('/')[2];

var newDate = month + '-' + day + '-' + year;
answer = newDate;

Works like a charm. And thanks for your help and time.

[JimCheffer]

Thanks rgarland and Benjamin. This works great. I used it today for two dates that we were trying to import.

[vaibhav000]

Thanks BBurdick and Rick

This helped a lot,

it worked..

Regards

Vaibhav