changing date formatting in Power Query

[lezawang]

Hi
I have Date column in PowerQ and I want to change the format from for example yyyy.mm.dd to dd.mm.yyyy, I found the site but I thought it must be easier than that. I thought it is like excel, highlight and go to custome format and do DD-MM-YYYY or whatever format you want .. Is there easier way to change the format in PowerQ for the date? thank you very much.

https://www.myonlinetraininghub.com/power-query-date-formats

 

[Alex Blakenburg]

Step 1 is to change the data type from ABC123 to Date.
Have you done that ?

 

[lezawang]

Thank you. I changed it to Date and it is date now in this format yyyy-mm-dd
how can I change it to dd-mm-yyyy for example? Thank you again

 

[Alex Blakenburg]

Power Query by default will show the date in whatever the format is as set by your windows short date regional setting.

A quick way to check that is to create a new empty workbook and in any cell hit Ctrl+; (semi-colon).
It should enter today's date in the short date format as set by the Region Setting.
If this is yyyy-mm-dd then that is why Power Query is showing that.

If your region format is different to that. Are you by any chance working in a workbook you received from someone else ?
If you and they have used PQ then you can have a look in the PQ settings

File > Options and settings > Query Options > Current Workbook > Regional Settings > Locale (yours)

Note: you can not format in PQ as such. You can only set the data type so that Excel will get the right type and Excel is able to format it. The final date format would be done in Excel.