# List of supported date formats

Wizard has advanced facilities for analyzing date information, and so it’s useful to be able to import dates as dates, and not as text. Wizard will always recognize dates when they are stored as numbers in spreadsheets, databases, and binary files; however, Wizard requires some guidance if the dates are stored as text, or appear in plain-text file formats, such as CSV.

If an importer can recognize text as dates, the import dialog will include controls for selecting the date format. By default Wizard will always recognize dates in ISO-8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD), but an additional localized date convention can be selected. Supported date conventions include:

- YYYY/MM/DD
- MM/DD/YYYY (i.e., American)
- DD/MM/YYYY (i.e., British)
- DD.MM.YYYY (i.e., German)

In the above cases, both two- and four-digit years are supported, as are months and days with and without a zero padding character.

To select a default date format when opening files without an import dialog (for example, when double-clicking a file in the Finder), use the Preferences window.

See also:

- List of supported file formats
- Importing delimiter-separated files
- Converting a text column to a numeric column

Back to Wizard Help