Dates imported from excel documents were stored as integers

Question

Dates entered in the "short date" format in Excel were imported differently into OpenRefine. For example, 8/30/2019 in Excel became Fri Aug 30 00:00:00 EDT 2019 in OpenRefine. I would like to get them back to a short date (mm/dd/yyyy) or even a string (mmddyyyy) format, with no day of week, time, or time zone data retained. I've been trying to transform them but can't figure out the grel code.

Answer 1

The toString() function takes an optional format string that you can use for this. You can use value.toString('M/d/y') (or toString(value,'M/d/y'))to get a string in the format of your first example. Note, however, that once you convert it to a string you'll lose the ability to use any of the date related functions like calculating how far apart two dates are.