Formatting Dates for Gravity Forms in Microsoft Excel

Fixing date formatting in Excel #

Gravity Forms fields can be formatted in many ways

If your current spreadsheet isn’t using the currect format, the import may not work. Here’s how to fix the formatting in Microsoft Excel.

Dropdown menu for selecting date formats in Gravity Forms, options include mm/dd/yyyy and yyyy-mm-dd

Open your spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel

Note: in this tutorial, we’re using Mac Excel 2010 in this example, so your look and feel may be different. The process should remain the same. So is the pain of using Excel!

Spreadsheet in Excel displaying dates under "Funky Date Format" in column A

Select the column by clicking on the header

Excel column A selected to format date entries under "Funky Date Format"

If “Date” doesn’t work, select the “Custom…” option next

This will allow us to create our own date format to match the field’s date format.

Excel custom date format option selected for date column

Click on Custom from the “Category” list and define your own date format

Excel's Format Cells dialog for custom date format mm/dd/yyyy selection

To create a format that will be accepted by Gravity Forms, use the following values:

dd is the day using two digits (01-31)
mm is the month using two digits (01-12)
yyyy is the year using four digits (2016)

As a reminder, here are the date formats that are used in Gravity Forms. Enter the format you need into the “Type” field:

mm/dd/yyyy (example: 06/18/2016)
dd/mm/yyyy (example: 18/06/2016)
dd-mm-yyyy (example: 18-06-2016)
dd.mm.yyyy (example: 18.06.2016)
yyyy/mm/dd (example: 2016/06/18)
yyyy-mm-dd (example: 2016-06-18)
yyyy.mm.dd (example: 2016-06-18)

Click OK to save the format, and you’re done!

🎉 Now that date is formatted the way you need it!

Column A showing dates in "MM/DD/YYYY" format under "Funky Date Format" header

I don’t know if dates ever look great (even 08/08/2008, which looked pretty wonderful), but your dates look much better now than they did a few minutes ago.

If you have any questions, please contact our support, and we’ll be happy to help.