I have a bunch of ISO-8601 formatted strings in a column of my sheet. How can I get google sheets to treat them as Dates so I can do math on them (difference in minutes between two cells, for example)? I tried just =Date("2015-05-27T01:15:00.000Z") but no-joy. There has to be an easy way to do this. Any advice?
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I find it more than a little surprising that formal ISO-8601 is the one date format that Google does not support.
– Jefferey Cave
3 Answers
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To get an actual Date value which you can format using normal number formatting...
=DATEVALUE(MID(A1,1,10)) + TIMEVALUE(MID(A1,12,8))
eg.
| A | B | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2016-02-22T05:03:21Z | 2/22/16 5:03:21 AM |
- Assumes timestamps are in UTC
- Ignores milliseconds (though you could add easily enough)
The DATEVALUE() function turns a formatted date string into a value, and TIMEVALUE() does the same for times. In most spreadsheets dates & times are represented by a number where the integer part is days since 1 Jan 1900 and the decimal part is the time as a fraction of the day. For example, 11 June 2009 17:30 is about 39975.72917.
The above formula parses the date part and the time part separately, then adds them together.
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