Formatting Dates using the Common table capabilities

[Jodie Miners]

What is the exact syntax for formatting dates in a table (using Excel Macro), or what is the trick?. I can not get it to work at all.

My Excel content has column 1 as the date. The date is formatted in Excel as DD/MM/YYYY. In the wiki page I only want it to show as MMM-YYYY and be sortable so it sorts in date order.

Here is what I have tried.

• Format the Date in MMM-YYYY in Excel and set the columnTypes=D - sorts as text, not date.
• Format the Date in DD/MM/YYYY in Excel and set the columnTypes=D - sorts as Date - OK, but I don't want the day shown.
• Set columnTypes=DMM-yyyy - it does nothing
• Set the language=EN|country=AU Parameters to see if that changes anything - nope.

Any ideas that can help?

[Bob Swift OSS (Bob Swift Atlassian Apps) · Accepted solution]

Yes, you need the date.js file installed correctly for any Advanced date sorting. Specifically in .../includes/js. However, there is no data converted - you are just telling the macro the format of the field for sorting purposes.

[Jodie Miners]

Thanks for that answer Bob, so I gather then that there is no way to re-format the data at all between the display in Excel and the display in the page.

My answer is that I will have to display the date as MM-YYYY in Excel, install the date.js then set the Date format for the sort.

It all makes sense when you know how :).

Thanks

[Amalia]

which version of Confluence are you using?

[Jodie Miners]

3.5.7 currently.

[Jodie Miners]

I think I may have answered my own question. Is the date formatting of DMM-yyyy etc only available if you install the date.js file on the server? I think I have tried that previously on another server and not had much luck with it.