Cell formatting (date vs. text) of the CSV contact list I upload | XM Community
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Cell formatting (date vs. text) of the CSV contact list I upload

  • 9 January 2020
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Cassiopeia
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Hi!

I have a couple of date fields in the CSVs I use to launch the same survey every week. Both fields are identified as embedded data, format=date, in the survey flow.

My question: when I'm preparing a CSV contact list before uploading it, is it important whether the *cell formatting* for those dates is set to Text vs. Date? (Either way, the dates in those cells are displayed as YYYY-MM-DD; I'm not asking about the date formatting, but rather, the properties of the cells themselves.) Thanks!
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Best answer by MattBroffman_Orlando 9 January 2020, 19:17

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Cassiopeia
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Further clarification: if I click on one of those date value cells and then look in the formula bar, this is what I see for each type (both of which display in the cell itself as "2020-01-26").

If the cell is formatted as text:
'2020-01-26

If the cell is formatted as a date:
01/26/2020

Does Qualtrics care which version I use? Or will the value only be recognized as an embedded date field if I use one version or the other? (I use OpenOffice for my CSVs, if that matters.)
MattBroffman_Orlando
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Because qualtrics uses YYYY-MM-DD as the format and the categorization as a date doesn't happen until it gets embedded in the survey (you can't categorize embedded data in the contact directory). What you need to check is that it gets into the contact field as YYYY-MM-DD.

There's a good chance that open office is just changing the display. To test this when you export the CSV and make sure it's in YYYY-MM-DD. If it is you should be OK. You can test with both formats to see if it matters.

I would also run a test with your contact info import...send out the survey and fill it out and make sure it works end to end before doing your entire distribution.

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