🆕 Comparing Dates

General
41

So you’re saying that a person could potentially submit a form towards the beginning or end of a day (which includes the device datetime in the form submission), and the present/past compare will sometimes show as ‘Past’ immediately after submission?

42

Not immediately after submission but it shows past when the date of the sheet owner (that is me) changes. So because of different countries, it shows past entry to a person because the date in my timezone is different.

43

Are you manipulating the date in any way in the sheet, or are you keeping it as the raw date from glide? It’s my impression that dates that come from a form submission are the user’s date on the device and I’ve always assumed that the ‘is Today’ function in glide would also use the same date/time of the user’s device, but I don’t work with anything outside of my timezone, so I don’t really know.

44

Dates that come from a submission is the device’s date, I can confirm this as I worked with a client 11 timezones away just yesterday. Tried to sort the form results by latest first but his submission is 11 hours behind me so didn’t go up first as intended.

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45

No manipulation. It’s weird because users are reporting that they aren’t seeing certain components which they should see if the date of last entry is today and there’s no way for me to preview it from my desktop because when I preview, Glide takes my local time and compares it with “today”

46

I guess that’s not how I would expect it to work, unless the app keeps track of the sheet timezone somewhere internally for these checks, but still submits the device time through the datetime special value.

PS. The forum thinks I talk to much. This popped up as I was typing :wink: So if anybody else has ideas…

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47

I have compared 2 dates, both short format date only.

If I output them through the ITE they output as Date & Time. Am I missing something obvious to have them output in Date only?

48

Setting the format on date columns, or numeric columns is only cosmetic. The underlying values are still there. You’ll need a template column to “lock in” whichever format you choose on the date column. Then have the If/Then return the template column value.

49

Perfect! Thank you. At least it wasn’t too obvious :slight_smile:

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50

This still makes it difficult when trying to equate a date with a date with timestamp. Basically filtering all the timestamps on a given day… The simplest way I found is to test IF DateDiff = Round(datewithtimestamp - date - 0.5, 0) = 0

51

Does the “is within” option work for you when comparing 2 date columns?

The other way is to convert both of them to numerical values and compare them, I don’t think you need to use Sheet formulas to do this.

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52

Absolutely agree. Using spreadsheet formulas to compare or manipulate dates is akin to starting a fire by rubbing sticks together.

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