Power Automate Time Conversion from Form Submission Failing

[SteveP53]

I am having an issue with converting time. I have a form that is being filled out. The form includes date selections. When a user completes the form, I have a Power Automate Trigger that is grabbing the data that fills in an excel sheet send an email to our support desk with the request. The dates are coming in as a 5-digit number. I am now trying to convert that number to an ISO 8601 format, but I keep getting an error when testing the flow. I am using this to format the date formatDateTime(outputs('Get_a_row')?['body/1st Choice Date'],'d')

Error
Action 'Send_an_email_notification_(V3)' failed

Unable to process template language expressions in action 'Send_an_email_notification_(V3)' inputs at line '1' and column '20858': 'In function 'formatDateTime', the value provided for date time string '44263' was not valid. The datetime string must match ISO 8601 format.'.

[tom_riha · Accepted solution]

Hello @SteveP53 ,

dates from Excel file are not provided as dates, but as a number of days from the 'base' date of 12/30/1899. You can use the addDays(...) expression to calculate that date, example:

addDays('12/30/1899',int(outputs('Get_a_row')?['body/1st Choice Date']))

[SteveP53]

It looks like if I add the formatdatetime expression before your expression, which gives me the result I needed. Thank you for your help @tom_riha.

formatDateTime(addDays('12/30/1899',int(outputs('Get_a_row')?['body/1st Choice Date'])),'d')

[SteveP53]

@tom_riha I have a similar issue when trying use the completion date/time stamp. Below I am getting this response.

Unable to process template language expressions in action 'Send_an_email_notification_(V3)' inputs at line '1' and column '20621': 'In function 'formatDateTime', the value provided for date time string '44261.6041898148' was not valid. The datetime string must match ISO 8601 format.'.

I tried these three formats, all fails.

formatDateTime(addDays('12/30/1899',int(outputs('Get_a_row')?['body/Completion time'])),'g')

formatDateTime(UTC((outputs('Get_a_row')?['body/Completion time'])),'g')

formatDateTime(outputs('Get_a_row')?['body/1st Choice Date'],'d')

[SteveP53]

Ok, after some searching I found a way to extract date and time from an excel sheet and convert it to a proper Date Time format in an email using the formateDateTime expression. Thanks to @tom_riha for getting me the expression that works for converting date only from an excel sheet which was the original solution. The below expression captures the Date and Time stamp.

formatDateTime(addseconds('1899-12-30',int(formatnumber(mul(float(outputs('Get_a_row')?['body/Completion time']),86400),'0'))),'g')

Credit for this expression goes to RYAN MACLEAN CONVERTING EXCEL DATE TIME SERIAL VALUES WITH POWER AUTOMATE .