Best Practice for Custom GxP DateTime Format for Export & Excel Analysis

I’m wondering if anyone can recommend a best practice for the Custom DateTime format for GxP use such that it still is month apparent but is also recognized as a proper datetime when the exported CSV is opened in Excel.

I’ve posted about another DateTime export/import issue we’ve had before (CSV File Uploader Date/Time Format Issues), and we think leveraging the Custom DateTime setting could resolve this, but before we move forward with the Change Request to have IT effect that change in our Production instance (where the validation feature flag is enabled), I wanted to find out if other’s have already determined an optimal format for GxP compliance and export/import compatibility.

We use a custom date format of DDMMMYYYY (01JAN1970), but this doesn’t alter the format used when the data is exported from the table. The custom datetime format is likely a transformation that is applied when the data is retrieved for rendering on the frontend, and doesn’t actually alter the real format of the data.

I would expect you can still get this to run for excel analysis as I’m pretty sure Excel does support custom date formatting and format specification for dates. You just may need to manually specify that the column is indeed in a time format, or that it is a custom time format following MMM/DD/YYYY hh:mm:ss Z for the default timestamp formatting.

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