Hi, Mynda,
I noticed in your tutorial (2.05) that the imported dates were in Excel date format, so I made sure that they were in short date format before I loaded the query into Excel. Well, after doing so, the dates were in standard Excel format anyway. Is there a way to avoid that, or do I just need to reformat the dates after loading the query? It seems like this could be a problem when the data is refreshed if it returned the dates to the Excel date format.
Thanks and regards,
Teri
Hi Teri,
Thanks for using the forum to post your question. I've moved it to the Course Members Power Query forum. Please use this forum for course related questions going forward.
When you format a date in Power Query it isn't formatting like we have in Excel, it's a data type. The data type helps Excel and Power Pivot know what type of data is in that column, as opposed to determining how the data should appear in a cell once loaded into the worksheet. Having said that, default formatting for the data type will be applied, but it's nothing fancy.
Power Query tries to detect a data types in the data you load. If a date is correctly formatted as a date serial number when you load it into Power Query then it's going to have an easier time identifying the data as a 'date' data type. If you load text formatted dates into Power Query you will probably have to tell it the column is a 'date' data type.
When you load the data back into an Excel Table it will come in with the default formatting for the relevant data type. If you want anything different or custom then that gets applied in Excel as you normally would.
So, the moral of the story is don't waste time formatting your dates in your source data nicely as you'll only have to do it again once you close and load to the table.
I hope that clarifies it for you but if you have further questions please let me know.
Mynda
Hi, Mynda,
That does clarify it. Thanks for the reply.
Teri
