Power Query - Custom Column - Less than Date

[andyn1983]

Ok, not technically Power BI (at this stage) as I need to do some data work in Excel before moving it into PowerBI but i'm trying to create a custom column in PowerQuery that has a formula along the lines of

if [company] = "CompanyA" and [date opened] < "01/01/2017" then "Pre 2017" else "2017"

But I am getting an error "We cannot apply operator < to types Text and Date" 

Appreciate this is probably really simple, and if in excel I could use DATE(), but I am new to PowerQuery and the syntax.

How do I get this to work correctly please? 

[MarcelBeug · Accepted solution]

Replace "01/01/2017" by: #date(2017,1,1)

[andyn1983]

THANK YOU!!! 

Easy when you know how 🙂   had tried date(2017,1,1) didn't know about the need to add a #.

Thanks again.

Andy.