Calculated Field and Date Time Field

Hi Lisa,

You could save the calculated field to a backing text field column and then update the date column via the workflow.   There isn't an out of the box way that I know of to connect the calculated field directly to a date column, although I wish there were!

-Mike

Lisa,

Saw this and wanted to know what are you attempting to achieve? I thought you had the dates in the corrected format from the last question. 

What is the end result and maybe we can work towards that.

I got the calculated field set up as you said. However, I already have date fields that need to be populated and that users will continue to populate manually. So I thought taking those calculated field values and moving them over would achieve that.

I was getting error messages simply copying the calculated field values. Its crazy. It shouldn't be this hard. I should just be able to update these dates.

Can you share what your list and workflow look like? In your workflow you could bring in the calculated date as a variable setup as a date.  You should then be able to set item or update item and set the field to the variable.  Is that not working?

Here ya go!

I changed this workflow when I couldn't get the date to work. I have it so it is pulling a text field from the source that has dates in it and putting it in a text field in the target. I figured then I could in SharePoint change the target text field manually to a date. But it kept throwing errors when I would try to update.

I think part of the problem is there are some dates that have an extra space after the month.

Its got to be something simple that is causing an issue. What does your list look like?

Date field does tend to be very picky as to what it'll accept as a valid value.  Do you have the SP list date field set to display just Date or both Date and Time? 

Ok, I found the issue. Of course, I found it by accident. It was the data. For any date that was a single digit date there were two spaces in between the date and the month. For example, Nov 5 2016 was Nov  5 2016. Nov 15 2016 would be correct. So when the workflow would try to convert this, it would cause an error. I never caught it because the very first date was a single digit date!!! That immediately threw an error. So instead of wasting time, I just copied the items in a spreadsheet and scrolled through and tried to find the single digit dates and fix them. It wasn't terribly bad. Then I just copied and pasted them in the Quick Edit View in SharePoint 100 at a time. Before doing it I changed it to text field. When I finished I changed it to date/time not displaying the time. It worked like a charm!

It sure was!!!! I hate when that happens! An Excel macro populated the source list which messed the data up.

I don't know which answer to mark as correct. Mike did point me in the direction about how picky the convert function was and how it wouldn't accept just any data.

I would mark your revelation of the issue as correct so people know to check the data as well :-). 

Thanks Eric Harris​ and Mike M​ for helping me on this! I want to be sure to give you some credit by directly using your name (Mention) so you can get some points as well.