Format a Date and DateTime values in Power Automate

November 9th 2023

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.

UPDATE: We’re excited to announce some significant updates to Flowr for Power Automate! As of October 2024, we’ve improved by updating action names and splitting Flowr’s central Power Automate connector into nine specialized connectors. These changes will make your workflow faster, smoother, and more efficient. The new action names are more precise and intuitive, saving you time, while the focused connectors enhance performance and flexibility. This update also helps future-proof the platform for even more powerful features. Check out our updated action names blog.

Author
Jay Goodison

Managing Director

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