ISO-8601 String to Date in Google Sheets cell

Question

I have a bunch of ISO-8601 formatted strings in a column of my sheet. How can I get google sheets to treat them as Dates so I can do math on them (difference in minutes bet

Answer 1

Try this

=CONCATENATE(TEXT(INDEX(SPLIT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"Z",""),"T"),1),"yyyy-mm-dd")," ",TEXT(INDEX(SPLIT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"Z",""),"T"),2),"hh:mm:ss"))

Where A1 can be a cell with ISO-8601 formatted string or the string itself.

Answer 2

To get an actual Date value which you can format using normal number formatting...

=DATEVALUE(MID(A1,1,10)) + TIMEVALUE(MID(A1,12,8))

eg.

╔═══╦══════════════════════╦════════════════════╗
║   ║          A           ║          B         ║
╠═══╬══════════════════════╬════════════════════╣
║ 1 ║ 2016-02-22T05:03:21Z ║ 2/22/16 5:03:21 AM ║
╚═══╩══════════════════════╩════════════════════╝

• Assumes timestamps are in UTC
• Ignores milliseconds (though you could add easily enough)

The DATEVALUE() function turns a formatted date string into a value, and TIMEVALUE() does the same for times. In most spreadsheets dates & times are represented by a number where the integer part is days since 1 Jan 1900 and the decimal part is the time as a fraction of the day. For example, 11 June 2009 17:30 is about 39975.72917.

The above formula parses the date part and the time part separately, then adds them together.

Answer 3

I found it much simpler to use =SUM(SPLIT(A2,"TZ"))

Format yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.000 to see the date value as ISO-8601 again.