Learn SharePoint In Series - Part Twenty Two - Date And Time Column Type In SharePoint

In the previous article, I have explained everything about Person or Group column type in SharePoint lists. We have seen the different behavior of the column in Lists. Now in this article, I will be explaining Date and Time Column type in detail. In this article, I am going to cover the following topics in detail.

• Background
• Introduction to Date and Time column type
• Creating Date and Time column type
• Properties and Options available in Date and Time column type
• Summary

Background

While managing the metadata of the document or any content, it is always very important to know and track when the document or content was created and when it was created and by whom it was created. For tracking the user who created and modified the contents, we have Person or Group columns. In the same way for tracking when the document was created and when the document was last modified there is a Date and Time column type available. Let's explore this column types in detail in this article.

Introduction to Date and Time column type

Date and Time column type is a very special column type in SharePoint. This column type is used to store the data in the format of date and time. This column type can be used to store the date of birth, date of joining, due date for any tasks, expiry date for any announcements and many such data which includes dates or time. This column type can be used to store only dates or date and time together. There is no such facility available by which we can store only time values.

Creating Date and Time column type

You can refer to this article to know how to create a column in many ways, you can select any way and while creating date and time column just select the Date and Time radio button as shown in figure.

Properties of Date and Time column type

There are several properties available using which we can configure the Date and Time columns. The properties are.

• Date and time Format
  Here there are 2 options.. Date Only and Date & Time. If you want that the column should contain only the date value then in that case you can select Date Only type. By default Date Only is selected. This type can be used when you are storing data like date of joining, date of birth, etc because here we do not require the time values. Sometimes we need to store the date and time value both, such as last modified date and time of contents, document uploaded date and time etc.

• Display Format
  Here we have two values again. One is Standard and other is Friendly. Both the values are used to configure the look and feel of the displaying date and time values. There are several cases in this such as:

• If Date and Time Format is Date Only and Display Format is Standard then this will display the date in standard format like 7/10/2018 (MM/DD/YYYY)

• If Date and Time Format is Date Only and Display Format is Friendly then this will display the date like Today, Yesterday,Tomorrow, then it will display the week days such as Monday, Tuesday if the date lies in current week, else it will display like July 22 etc.

• If Date and Time Format is Date & Time and Display Format is Standard then this will display the date and time in the format 7/10/2018 12:00 AM (MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM AM/PM).

• If Date and Time Format is Date & Time and Display Format is Friendly then this will display the date and time in the format like Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday, July 22 etc.

• Default Value
  Using this option we can configure the default values in the date and time columns, This contains options like None; if None is selected then no default values will be set. As for Today’s Date, if this value is selected then by default we will have today’s date auto populated in the control or else we can enter any custom date and time that should be default populated.

Also note that when we create a Date and Time column and try to input the values into it, it will provide a date and time picker control using which we can enter the date and time values to the columns. The default date and time picker looks like this:

Summary

So in this article we have explored the SharePoint Date and Time column types available in SharePoint list. If you have any query regarding these columns then please do let me know in the comment section and I will update my article to include your queries and solution to the questions.

In the next article I am going to cover Look Up column types in SharePoint lists.