Forum Discussion
Date.FromText
You’re not wrong - the behavior here is confusing.
Date.FromText does support culture, but not in the way you’re trying to use it.
A few clarifications:
- The Culture parameter is mainly used when parsing ambiguous text (e.g. 01/02/2020)
- It doesn’t reliably work when combined with a Format record like in your example
- In some cases, IntelliSense even shows it as unsupported, which adds to the confusion
In practice:
- If you already specify a Format, Power Query relies on that and culture has little to no effect
- Culture is more relevant when you don’t provide a format and Power Query needs to interpret the text
So what you’re seeing is expected - culture won’t have much (or any) impact in your current example.
Odet Maimoni
BI Engineer | Microsoft MVP
I share practical Power BI tips on YouTube
thanks, starting to make some progress, so if i have
= let adate = "03/02/2020" in adateso this give ambiguous text date ; so i a can use ;
= let adate = "03/02/2020" in
Date.FromText( adate)
or specify culture;
let adate = "03/02/2020" in
Date.FromText( adate, "en-GB")
Now as my windows settign are win eng uk, the default is dd / MM / yy ,
so when is use
= let adate = "03/02/2020" in
Date.FromText( adate , "en-US") the date now = MM / dd / yy and now i can do what i was oriinally trying to do, which is take a uk format as text ,
have as proper date but in US format;
= #table ( type table [ adate = date] ,
{{ let adate = "03/02/2020" in
Date.FromText( adate , "en-US") }} )and yep it works when add dayys is used.
Richard.
Regardign MS documentation.
Taken from co pilot, so hope allowed;
Where the “Format record” confusion comes from
Power Query does have functions that accept a record with [Format=…, Culture=…], but they are:
Value.FromText
Number.FromText
DateTime.FromText (in some host environments)
DateTimeZone.FromText (in some host environments)
But not Date.FromText.
This is why the documentation feels inconsistent — because it is.