Power BI -> Pivot Table. Date column returning as text.

Hi ZWJ_Create , Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Community Forum.

Fields placed in the Rows or Columns area are treated as member captions (labels), so Excel exposes them as text values in worksheet cells, even when the underlying datatype is Date or Whole Number. That’s why both your Date field and Excel serial number return ISTEXT() = TRUE. And yes the same field behaves properly in the Values area. In that case Excel is aggregating the underlying numeric value instead of returning the label text.

As far as I know, there is no setting to disable this automatic conversion for row/column fields in OLAP/Data Model PivotTables. It’s a limitation of how Excel exposes Pivot hierarchy members. The usual workaround is to convert the value back in formulas. If your analysts need extensive downstream date calculations, pull the data into a flat table outside the PivotTable structure (Power Query, CUBE formulas or copied Pivot output), because Pivot row headers will continue behaving as text.