Date.FromText

[Dicken]

Hi, 

 the Date.FromText function,   does it takea 'Culture'  so i know there is plenty of documenttion saying yes; so even though 

= let d = "03/Apr/2020" 
in Date.FromText( d, [Format = "dd/MMM/yyyy", Culture = "en-GB" ] )

i have yet to find a sitution whrere the culture has any effect ( or impact as everyone seems to say now) , 
also if you leave out the Format and just use culture the ineli sense pop up says Culture not supported , so does 
anyone have a definitive answer  ? 

[Odet_Maimoni · Accepted solution]

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

[Dicken]

thanks, starting to make some progress,  so if i have 

= let adate = "03/02/2020" in adate

so 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. 

[Dicken]

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.