CONCATENATE with a date?

[anon41232381]

Hello Honeycode Community,
I am trying to use CONCATENATE with a column that is marked as a Date & Time format. However, instead of getting the date, the resulting string gets a numeric value such as 44678.14819284.

Is there some function to pass the date to before passing it to the CONCATENATE function to have a Date & Time output correctly as text?

Thanks in advance,
-Tommi

[Alyssa]

@anon41232381 Hi Tommi, welcome to the community and thanks for posting!

There are different Honeycode functions that you could use in your formula which would convert the date or time data into text. For example, you can write the month, day, and year of a date, and display it in a format you'd like with the CONCATENATE formula.

Here's an example:
=CONCATENATE("The event's date is ",MONTH([Date]), "-", DAY([Date]), "-", YEAR([Date]))

Which returns: "The event's date is 5-15-2021"

Hope this helps! There's different time functions you can explore to create your string. Let us know if we can help any further with this.

[anon41232381]

Hi Alyssa,
Thanks. I realized I had been silly.

I had tried those functions before, but they hadn't worked. But this was because I entered test data by hand and didn't press enter and instead clicked from column to column.

So first, I had the "date and time" printing fine in a test because, unknown to me at the time, the data actually wasn't in the date and time format. But then I noticed none of the filtering worked. This got fixed after revisiting the data and realizing the mistake; each enter press made the hand written am and pms uppercase. But then, the CONCATENATE didn't work.

But in fact, now that the data is correct, the date functions that previously didn't seem to work work perfectly. I had scrubbed the functions off thinking they work only with a date format, and not with a date & time format, since there are the separate functions for the time parts (e.g. Today vs Now).

I guess the lesson is to always press enter and double check everything.

[Alyssa]

@anon41232381 Hi Tommi,

Great Well, it's good that you realized it was something small!

Yes, you can use either a column format or formulas to display data as you'd like. Formulas will need to evaluate, and then you would see your returned result. Pressing "Enter" would do that as you noted; clicking to another cell would trigger it as well.

Thanks for your quick follow-up and feel free to reach out to us again if you have any other questions.