In this post, we will learn how to format date in Power Automate and how to change date format in Power Automate in different date formats like dd/MM/yyyy, MM/dd/yyyy …etc

Date Format in Power Automate

Power Automate is one of the four products of the Microsoft Power Platform which is a cloud-based automation platform that allows users to build automated processes across different apps and services in no-code/low-code.

In Power Automate, if you tried to use a date field in your flow in an Email body or a Microsoft Team message, you will note that the default date format in Power Automat is shown as in this format YYYY-MM-ddT21:00:00.000Z even you have formatted the date field in your data source with your desired format!

In many cases, the default Power Automate Date format is not acceptable to be used, and you may need to format date in Power Automate in different date formats like dd/MM/yyyy, MM/dd/yyyy …etc

How to Format Date in Power Automate?

Consider, you have a table with a date column as shown below

And you need to create a Power Automat flow to send an email or post a Microsoft Team Message for each user in this table based on specific criteria.

In the message/email body, you need to send the task details like Task Name, and its finished date.

But when you send the date in Microsoft Team message or email body from Power Automate, you will note that the Power Automate Date format is shown in a standard format that may not match your requirements as below.

To Format Date in Power Automate, you have to do the following:

1. Ensure that your field holds a value in a correct date fromat.
2. Create a new variable with a string format outside your loop
3. Set the created variable to the date value.
4. Use the FormatDateTime() function in Power Automate.

1) Ensure Date Field Fomat

Regardless of your current data source, you have first to make sure that the current field value is in a correct date format to ensure that your flow will work as expected.

In our example, we have a “Finish Date” column in a correct date format that will be used in our Email body in Power Automate.

2) Create a new variable in Power Automate

Due to our flow will loop for each row in our table, you have to initialize a new variable outside this loop.

How to Create a Variable in Power Automate?

To initialize or create a new variable in Power Automate to be outside your loop, you have to do the following:

1. Between the trigger and the loop, click on the Plus icon to insert a new step as action.

2. Search for Variables, and from the variable search result, select “Initialize Variable“.

3. Set the Variable name as you prefer, then set the variable data type to “String”.

3) Set a variable in Power Automate

Now you have to set the date value to the newly created variable In your loop by doing the following:

1. In your loop, add a new action.

2. Search for variables, and then select “Set Variable” action.

3. Finally, in “Set Variable” action, select the variable name and the date field name.

4) Use FormatDateTime() in Power Automate

After setting the date variable with the date field, you can now use the FormatDateTime() in Power Automate to format your date in different date formats like dd/MM/yyyy, MM/dd/yyyy …etc

To format Date in Power Automate using FormatDateTime() function, you have to do the following:

1. Below the “Set Variable” action, add another action to send Email or Post Microsoft Teams message to a specific channel for specific user as you need.

2. In messae body, add new expression with the below function based on your variable name and the required date format.

formatDateTime(variables('VariableName'),'MM-dd-yyyy')

3. Click Ok to add the FormatDateTime function in your message body.

4. Now, test and run your flow, you should note that the Power Automate Date format is sent to your chanel with the desired date fromat that was used in the FormatDateTime() function.

Format current date in Power Automate

In some scenarios, you may also need to send the current date in your email body or Microsoft Teams message, so in this case, you can easily use the utcNow() function from the expression section to send the current date.

utcNow()

However, you will note that the current date is sent in a format that may be not suitable for you as below:

To fix this issue and format the current date in Power Automate, you have also to use the formatDateTime() as the following:

formatDateTime(utcNow(),'MM-dd-yyyy')

Great, the current date has been formatted in ‘MM-dd-yyyy’ format after using formatDateTime() in Power Automate as shown below.

Standard date and time format specifiers

To format date in Power Automat in different dates format as you desire, you have to check the following table that describes the standard date and time format specifiers.

The following table also describes the custom date and time format specifiers and displays a result string produced by each format specifier.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we have learned how to format date in Power Automate in Email body or Microsoft Teams Message in different formats as we need.

See Also

• How to use Power Automate?
• How to use Date function in DAX Power BI?
• Power Platform and DevOps-Deploy solutions between environments

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