Importing date records into Big Tables

Weird issue here - wondering if anyone else has the issue. It took me a while to fathom out what was happening.

Imported a 65,000 row excel sheet into Big Tables. Import worked fine - except a date column shows 1 day earlier once imported than in the original sheet.

For example my spreadsheet says, as an example, 9 October, 1923 - but when it gets imported into the Big Table it gets imported as 8 October, 1923. It’s almost like there’s a timezone thing happening somewhere.

Has any one else experienced this issue? How do I fix it? It’s bizarre!

Russ

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Glide has a 0 time as PM… unlike most of platforms AM

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…so would that account for what is happening? How would I fix it? Russ

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I do not know if this is the problem in your case… try to subtract 12 hours from import… and do testing with many scenarios…
In many of my Apps, I translate from Glide time format to Google Sheets format…

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@Jeff_Hager Have you seen this behaviour before?

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Where would one find “Big Tables”… Do I need to request they be turned on?

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No. It is only happening in Big Tables. I might report it to the development team as a potential bug. Russ

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Hi Eric, You need to apply to be part of the Big Tables beta test group. It is well worth it. Takes a standard Glide sheet from 25,000 rows max to millions of rows. I think you need to be on a paid plan to be part of the pilot. Russ

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I don’t know if it depends on the timezone you are in, or what’s happening. For me a date with no time seems to default to noon (12pm), where I would expect it to default to midnight. I can’t reproduce the situation where it jumps to the wrong day. Seems like the time jumps forward for me, but it jumps backward for others. Even in cases where ai specify a time, it jumps ahead 12 hours.

Something is definitely off, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I mention more on it is this post.

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Thanks Jeff - really great suggestions.

The column is formatted as per the image below:
date_column

There is no ‘time’ included - just the date.

I live in New Zealand - which typically is 12 hours ahead of the rest of the world - which would account why the date imported is 12 hours behind.

I’ll check out the timezones thing - although wouldn’t have thought that would have been an issue with a column that didn’t include time.

Confusing.

Russ

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I’m only 6 hours of off GMT time, so I’m not sure where 12 hours comes into play for me, unless Glide is doing some kind of default time.

If you click on one of the date cells, as if you were going to edit it directly in the table, it should show you the true date timestamp, including time in ISO format…unless it imported some other way.

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Wow - now you’ve confused the heck out of me!!! :slight_smile:

Two images below - one shows the native format in the cell - the second - when I click on it. The first date is what is showing when I use that field in a screen - but the correct date (that was in the spreadsheet I imported the date from) is actually the second date.

date1
date2

This is weird. Don’t even know where to start to fix this.

Russ

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It’s important to know that the formatting for a date column (as well as a number column or a math column) is really just a forward facing format ONLY for display purposes. The true underlying value is still preserved.

I think you have a bug that is worth submitting to Glide. I’ve seen a handful of weird issues ever since Glide introduced the ‘Respect Timezone’ feature for Glide tables. So maybe that is tied in somewhere, but for myself, it has appeared to work better in the US, so I can’t quite put my finger on the true issue.

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Thanks Jeff.

I’ll check in with Glide.

Regards,
Russ

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Please get support from within Glide while the app is open by selecting the “?” button at the bottom right. That will bring you to a support page, which currently has an “Open Support Ticket” link.

Thanks I logged a ticket earlier with some screen shots. Russ

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I encountered a similar issue in Big table, where my CSV is dated 1/1/2018, but upon uploading, the time shows -8 hours to 2017.

Can we look into this @NoCodeAndy ?

Glide were pretty unhelpful when I reported it last year. Despite screen shots and videos they were unable to replicate it - I think they thought I was smoking my socks :-). I suspect it is a time zone issue - I live in New Zealand and we are 8 hours ahead of the States - which is the amount the time is out by.

In the end I had to create another column next to every date column with a formula to subtract 8 hours from it. It works but hardly elegant. Russ

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I thought of this too, but I concur with you.

However if I ever had to upload a clients CSV, it would be difficult to explain….