Possible date bug on CSV import

Hi Everyone - I decided to test the CSV import action, so I can import bank transactions into an app. Appsheet transposes the day and month of short date formats. I’m in the UK, so it’s DD/MM/YYYY. I imported from an Excel CSV with locale set as UK, in Chrome browser with locale set as UK into Appsheet with locale set as UK. After the import, Appsheet had transposed DD and MM for any dates with a day value =< 12 and ignored any others.

I downloaded a simple CSV from Google drive to rule out Excel. Appsheet did exactly the same.

I then changed the date format in the Google CSV to “DD MonthName YYYY”. Appsheet imported this fine, with no transposition.

I did the same date format change for the Excel CSV and Appsheet imported this fine, with no transposition.

It seems as though Appsheet gets confused by the short date format and ignores locale.

Can anyone help with this?

2 5 699
5 REPLIES 5

See my previous post for your guidance.

Wait for Appsheet team to advice, but likely dd/mm/yyyy is not recognized correctly upon loading through CSV import function for now.

AS a workaround, I m afraid we need to conduct bit of works to convert the date format to mm/dd/yyyy all the time.

I believe mm/dd/yyyy is “American” date format, so makes sense Appsheet takes it. But for me, the date format is yyyy/mm/dd… in my country.

Things are very complicated.

Each different appsheet user do have their prefer date format, which varids user by users.

Possibly, when we set up the import csv action within appsheet, app creator is asked for the date format they prefer. Then Appsheet can pick up the different requirement to recognize the csv file data format correctly. I assume we need a sort of “date converter” system within Appsheet.

@Phil

The most of the use cases of “import csv” features I can image is the app user will download the data in the format of CSV from external system, like you did export bank transaction from other system.
Each system should have their own date format.

Also the expectation of all the appsheet app users will expect the app will correctly upload the CSV data. All the expert should know the data format is bit tricky, but average app users probably dont care, just hope it SHOULD upload the data correctly.

Ask the app user "hey, you need to conver the date fields to mm/dd/yyyy all the time. Yes, we can ask, but unfortunately, the reaction from app users, “it is troublesome, I dont wanna do that and waste my time”. That s average answers, but good thing is it is always FIXED format.

All in all, the definition for date format for Import CSV action are also decleared by Apps creator for the seamless operation to make this feature useful and also “functional” in the practical place.

By the way, Import CSV file features still BETA stage.

Sounds like it is a particular bug in the CSV import function, if I’m reading Phil’s words correctly, so hopefully it will be sorted at some point.

Top Labels in this Space