Analyze in Excel - Date field issue

[erhodes]

When using 'Analyze in Excel' Date fields from my model show up in excel as text which really limits the usage of the Analyze in Excel functionality. Has anyone else encountered this and come up with a solution. 

[v-yuezhe-msft]

Hi @erhodes，

Based on my test,  PowerPivot changes the format of date columns to General when I use “Analyze in Excel” feature. From my point of view, the issue is related to PowerPivot, I find a connect item and several threads stating the issue that PowerPivot treats date columns as text, I would recommend you post the question in the Power Pivot forum to get dedicated support.

And you can also check the following similar threads.

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/c0253620-6ae0-46ea-8b6e-124e6c950239/powerp...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27913051/powerpivot-incorrectly-convert-date-value-to-text-in-piv...

Thanks,
Lydia Zhang

[landoncope]

I'm facing the same issue. I'm looking into PowerBI for the company I work for, largely because of the "Analyze in Excel" feature. I agree that not having dates working properly severely limits this feature's usefulness.

The obvious workaround is to create separate day/month/year fields in the dataset, but this is not ideal as it leads to confusion for end-users and broken reports down the road once they fix this issue (and remove said fields), etc.

[Eric]

Has this issue ever been resolved?  I am connecting to the PowerBi service (OLAP) and I am having the same issue with dates showing up as text in pivot tables.  

[bent3well]

Same issue here. I would like to use a Date field with Excel's Pivot Table Timeline feature, but when I attempt to create a Timeline, the following message appears: "We can't create a Timeline for this report because it doesn't have a field formatted as Date."

The field is formatted as a Date in Power BI, but using the Analyze in Excel feature disregards this formatting.

[mahimabedi]

Facing the same issue. Is there a fix or workaround for this?

[AndrewSEA]

Following.  This is a major issue with Analyze in Excel.   Can't filter the date range because it's a text string.

[prbkb]

I am facing the same issue