Date format that is guaranteed to be recognized by Excel

Question

We\'re exporting our analytics reports in various formats, among them CSV. For some clients this CSV finds it\'s way into Excel.

Inside the CSV file one of the colum

Answer 1

You have two options. Go with the month as a string and the year as 4 digits, or use ISO formatting: yyyy-mm-dd.

Answer 2

If you format your dates as follows in the csv output, Excel will parse the content exactly as a date (other columns for realism only)

43,somestring,="03/03/2003",anotherval
55,anotherstring,="01/02/2004",finalval

so add ="{date}" and it parses as date!