Date formats on modeling tab for measures not showing all format

[Adrian_PowerBI]

In the december BI Desktop release I was able to create measures that were dates and then change the format of the date using the data type in the modelling tab.

Now however in the January and February release, this date format noi longer exists. There are a lot of MM/DD.... type formats which don't make sense when my locale is set to UK.

The format used to exist - can we have it back please?

These common date formats are common to America but not the rest of the world. All date formats doesn't list the required format either.

I have tried using the format command however that changes the date to a text field which means all the slicers and other date related views mess up.

Have I missed some setting somewhere to get the dd/mm/yy date formats back? Can it not be changed to be a custom string that we can define ourselves rather than having a list of options?

Thanks,

Adrian

[v-qiuyu-msft]

Hi @Adrian_PowerBI,

The same issue has been reported internally before: CRI 56525764. 

The fix will be available in the desktop March release. 

Best Regards,
Qiuyun Yu 

[Anonymous]

I feel your pain Adrian!

At least your issue confirms I'm not going mad as you recall things as I do. The only UK Date formats I see in PBI Desktop right now are those that present the date as 31-Mar-2018. There's no format option to display the date as 31-03-2018 (day before month with month as a number in other words).

You can achieve the desired result by adding a new calculated column and forcing the format. But this is extra work, is not a long term solution and means the date value isn't recognised as a date by Power BI.

Date New = (format([Date],"dd/mm/yyyy"))

Adding Datevale() to the above just gets you back to the original issue.

At least I've been able to fix the issue of dates not appearing in UK date format in PBI reports when viewed in the Service in IE and Chrome. If you need any help with this let me know, and I'll update you if I find a workaround to the above.

Cheers,  Mark

[Adrian_PowerBI]

Thanks Mark,

I've noticed another place it causes a few issues. When entering a date manually in an advanced filter date selection box it assumes you are entering the date in mm/dd/yy format unless due to the day being greater than 12 swaps to dd/mm/yy. It's caught me out a couple of times with me wondering why my date range was out.

My workaround with the formats at this point was to roll back desktop version, create the formats I wanted then updated again to the lastest PBI Desktop version to get the new features I was after. Bit of a pain but it leaves the formats as they are when you do this.

Adrian

[Anonymous]

Hi @Adrian_PowerBI. Just in case you weren't aware, it looks like Microsoft have re-introduced the UK date formats to Power BI Desktop. I'm currently using the March 2018 version of the tool. Hopefully when I upgrade to the April 2018 version in the next few weeks they won’t disappear again. Enjoy 😉

[rubymaya]

Hi,

I have this same problem too, Im streaming data from shared  dataset, but the feature for this data type has been greyed out. I am trying to strip time from my datetime column.

Thx