ISO-8601 String to Date in Google Sheets cell

google-sheets google-docs
Bob Kuhar picture Bob Kuhar · May 27, 2015 · Viewed 29.4k times · Source

I have a bunch of ISO-8601 formatted strings in a column of my sheet. How can I get google sheets to treat them as Dates so I can do math on them (difference in minutes between two cells, for example)? I tried just =Date("2015-05-27T01:15:00.000Z") but no-joy. There has to be an easy way to do this. Any advice?

Answer

rcoup picture rcoup · Mar 23, 2016

To get an actual Date value which you can format using normal number formatting...

=DATEVALUE(MID(A1,1,10)) + TIMEVALUE(MID(A1,12,8))

eg.

╔═══╦══════════════════════╦════════════════════╗
║   ║          A           ║          B         ║
╠═══╬══════════════════════╬════════════════════╣
║ 1 ║ 2016-02-22T05:03:21Z ║ 2/22/16 5:03:21 AM ║
╚═══╩══════════════════════╩════════════════════╝
  • Assumes timestamps are in UTC
  • Ignores milliseconds (though you could add easily enough)

The DATEVALUE() function turns a formatted date string into a value, and TIMEVALUE() does the same for times. In most spreadsheets dates & times are represented by a number where the integer part is days since 1 Jan 1900 and the decimal part is the time as a fraction of the day. For example, 11 June 2009 17:30 is about 39975.72917.

The above formula parses the date part and the time part separately, then adds them together.

Related questions

Count number of cells with any value (string or number) in a column in Google Docs Spreadsheet

I have several columns in Google Spreadsheet. I would like to count how many cells have a value (number or string) and display that number at the top of the column. For example: Hello World 123 Some string The above column …

Read More
How to define global variable in Google Apps Script

I see most examples from Google is they use only functions in a single giant script. e.g. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/quickstart/macros But in our style, we usually write all functions under a single namespace, such as …

Read More
Axis scale in google charts (from google spreadsheets)

I've generated chart form google spreadsheets. In my report for horizontal axis I have values: 1 ,2 ,3 ,4 ,5 ,10 ,20 ,30 ,40 ,50 ,100 ,200 ,300 ,400 ,500 ,600 ,700 ,800 ,900 ,1000. Chart interprets them as a labels, not a number: So the distance between 1 and 4 is the same as between 20 and 50. How to change it? (Maybe …

Read More