Drillbridge Feature: Advanced Date Formats

The latest shipping version of Drillbridge Plus (3.4.2+) has a few new tricks up its sleeves for advanced handling of date values coming back from your SQL query. 

Generally when you retrieve a date value with a relational query, the “right thing” happens automatically – i.e., the date value is displayed how you want it to be displayed. For those cases where you want more control over the output, you can use your database’s string/date formatting functionality to convert the date to a string and display it however you want. 

The slight problem here is what if the date doesn’t come back how you want it and you then format it how you want it, usually what has happened is that the DATE/TIME/DATETIME/TIMESTAMP column is now just a string (such as VARCHAR). This looks fine on the normal Drillbridge results page, but when you download your report as an Excel file, Excel will just think it’s a string as opposed to a date. 

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