Post #12 of our Build Flows Faster series covering our new utility actions for Power Automate. We will publish many more posts and accompanying videos over the coming weeks, but today’s lesson is about formatting date values in Power Automate.
Our utility actions are targeted at helping you build flows more quickly with less complexity, and they brilliantly only use 0.05 actions from your Encodian Flowr and Vertr subscription allowance. For example, under a standard plan that permits 500 actions per month (uses), you could use the utility actions 10,000 times!
Introducing the ‘Format Date’ Utility Action
The ‘Format Date‘ utility action for Power Automate formats the date value provided to the date format provided
Video Guide: Format a Date and DateTime values in Power Automate
Instructions: Format a Date and DateTime values in Power Automate
The Trigger
As with many of our utility actions, there are a myriad of scenarios where you may need to format a date value. So, we’ll focus on how the ‘Format Date‘ utility action works as opposed to a specific scenario. Consider the following basic and manually triggered flow;
Format the date
1. Add the ‘Format Date‘ utility action to the flow
1.a. Date: Select the date value to format. For this example, I’ve selected the ‘Selected Date‘ property provided by the trigger action.
1.b. Format: Set the date format, referring to the following Microsoft article for detailed format guidance – Custom date and time format strings
1.c. Culture Name: Set the culture used to process the date value provided. Please refer to the Culture Names article for a list of supported cultures.
I have configured the format as follows:
- “dddd” is the name of the day of the week, for example: Friday
- “d” is the day of the month, for example: 11
- “MMMM” is the name of the month, for example: August
- “yyyy” is the year as a four-digit number, for example: 1997
Therefore, this example output value would equate to: Friday 11 August 1997
Send an email
Now, let’s do something simple with the formatted date value. I’ll configure the flow to send an email:
2. Add the ‘Send me an email notification’ action
2.a. Subject: Configure the email subject value as required
2.b. Body: Configure the email body as required, including the ‘Result‘ property provided by the ‘Format Date‘ utility action
Upon execution, the following email will be generated:
If you require further advice or support regarding Encodian utility actions, please email our support team at support@encodian.com where the team would be delighted to help.
