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tmitton's avatar
tmitton
Frequent Visitor
5 years ago
Solved

Convert month formatted as text to date

I've imported a data set to Power BI Desktop that I do not have any control over (i.e. I can't go into the dataset itself and reformat it). The only "time stamp" the data set contains is a single column formatted as text that contains an abbreviated month. I need to convert this to a date or create a new column that generates a date from this column so that I can create a working relationship with my date table. The new date needs to read as "January 2020" or "February 2020". The data set only contains data for 2020. 

 

 

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  • tmitton's avatar
    tmitton
    5 years ago

    Not sure if this was the best way, but I went into PQ Editor and replaced each of the 12 separate values with the full month name and year (e.g. replace "Jan" with "January 2020"), and this enabled Power BI to recognize the values as dates when I tried to convert. 

2 Replies

  • tmitton's avatar
    tmitton
    Frequent Visitor
    5 years ago

    Not sure if this was the best way, but I went into PQ Editor and replaced each of the 12 separate values with the full month name and year (e.g. replace "Jan" with "January 2020"), and this enabled Power BI to recognize the values as dates when I tried to convert.