Contribution Report includes TIME

Question

I'm creating a Contribution Report, Contribution Details. I include check the boxes for both Date Received and Receipt Date. The results for both include the time as well as the date. When I export it to a CSV file, there's the Time tagged on. In my Excel file, the Time lurks. Formatting the column doesn't delete the data but merely hides it. When I create a Merge Document in Word, the time appears and I can't delete it.

I don't want the TIME. Anywhere!

I have gone under Administer, Customize Data and Screens, then to Date Format and deleted the Time codes and left the Day, Year and Month codes. And I've gone to Administer > Localization > Date Formats and deleted the various codes various Time - and SAVED. Returning to those screens shows that Time is turned off.

What can I do to delete Time from my report?

Peter Keller

Answer 1

I took a look into this today because I thought this would be an easy fix. It's not really.

What IS easy is to get the Receive Date to respect the Date Format settings like you describe. If you know how to patch CiviCRM, you can find the patch I just wrote here.

However, this raises a bigger issue - there's only one Date Format for "Complete Date and Time", and most folks use that for letters to donors. So it defaults to something like "October 3rd, 2019 11:15am". My patch changes the report to output in this format.

However, I doubt that's what most people want from this report! Most folks want to be able to sort by date, and changing this report would be counterproductive to them.

That leaves us with two other options:

• Instead of using Contribution Details report, instead do an export of Contributions. If you don't like the format, the Format Date Column in Extension will solve this for you.
• Fix this in Excel with a formula. See my screenshot below for an example. My "Date Received" is column E, so I created a new column with the formula =LEFT(E2,10) in cell H2 and then pasted it down.

In the longer term, it might make sense for CiviCRM to differentiate between multiple date/time formats - one for public display, one for sorting purposes.