The Date field

There is no special “date” field type in DataPicta—fields are either text or numbers. Dates are simply text values that follow a date-friendly format, so they can be understood and used in charts.

DataPicta accepts date and time values in common, standards-based formats. If a value cannot be read as a valid date, we’ll skip it. To keep things smooth, stick to the well-defined ISO 8601 forms below. If you want a quick primer, see the ISO 8601 overview on Wikipedia.

Where DataPicta uses date/time

In the horizontal and vertical axis, you can set the type to time to get a date-based axis.

Recommended formats (ISO 8601)

• Date only: 2024-12-31 (order is YYYY-MM-DD; do not swap day and month)
• Date + time in UTC: 2024-12-31T14:30:00Z
• Date + time with offset: 2024-12-31T15:30:00+01:00
• Date + time with milliseconds: 2024-12-31T14:30:00.123Z

These formats are unambiguous, time-zone aware (when you include Z or an offset), and the most reliable.

Other formats (use sparingly)

These can be read, though ISO 8601 is still the safest choice:

• Long month name: December 31, 2024
• Short month name: Dec 31, 2024
• Date + time with a zone name: December 31, 2024 2:30 PM UTC

Formats to avoid

Please skip these; they’re ambiguous and often fail:

• 31-12-2024 or 12-31-2024 (day and month swapped)
• 12/31/2024 or 31/12/2024 (slashes and ambiguous order)
• 2024/12/31 (slashes instead of dashes)
• Two-digit years like 31-12-24

Copy-paste examples

2024-06-15
2024-06-15T09:45:00Z
2024-06-15T11:45:00+02:00
2024-06-15T09:45:00.250Z
December 15, 2024
Dec 15, 2024 9:45 AM UTC