Make.com: Time and Date Functions Explained

a couple of videos ago I talked about time zones and how you can convert them inside of make.com and the difficulties that come along with it and as well how you can actually manage them properly with external apis and you went crazy in the comments and in inside of Discord and you asked me tons of questions on how actually to convert that and how to do that and this video is basically a result of that so I'm here today to explain you all of the date and time functions that exist inside of make.com how you can leverage them and how you can actually make your own research on those make.com date and time functions and how you can leverage them for your very own time formats now if you haven't seen my previous this video I'm going to link it up here you should definitely check it out cuz it defines a lot of more things on how make.com works with time zones in the first place but to give you a very quick breakdown make basically breaks the time zones down in two parts which is the actual time zone that is on an organizational level so you define that in your organization of your make.com account this is the time zone that is used for scheduling things so anything that basically has a schedule attached to it just like you can see it here on the screen this little bubble right here when you click on it you can basically set an interval and you can even Define an actual time or specific date and this date is then basically all is adjusted depending on the time zone that your organizational level is set in the second part of the time zone setup is inside of your actual user account so you can also Define a time zone for your user which means that if your organization is in the US but you're working from Asia you can adjust your time zone to be displayed in the Asian time which means that even the the schedules that are set up they still depend on the US time zone but they will be displayed in your time zone so that it's easier for you to manage those time zone I've talked in my previous video a lot about why this is good and why this is bad so I'm not going to go into that so today's video is literally just about telling you more about the actual functions and how you can leverage them for your very own mac.com scenarios so to get started we're going to just add a demo module I'm going to add the tools with set multiple variables because we can define a couple of variables here that we can test and when we click now into a variable value field you can see the dynamic popup and over here you see this little part or this little icon which is a calendar clicking on it you can also see that we have a full calendar available and we also have variables and a couple of functions down here so I'm going to go over this part and this whole part is literally the whole focus of this video to give you an understanding on how it works and how you can leverage it so as up here it is literally just a standard calendar where you can select a static time and what I mean by Static time is we just going to click it right here you can see it basically added the time as kind of a time stamp with a time and with the AM PM definition right here I'm just going to call it static time for now and you will see as well you can see that it's the 13th of June 2024 at 11:22 click okay and when I run and when I run the S scenario now and we click up here you can now see see that it's the exact same time that comes over in as as the result as in inside of the variable so there is no change to it which means it is literally just a static text and it is not manipulated in any way now let's do the next part in the next part when we click back onto the date and time function we have the time stamp which is a very interesting one because that is actually a numeric time stamp so it's basically a big number that is based on seconds from a given starting point until now and this just defines that exact moment right in that time which is kind of like a time stamp but more in a technical way so you will probably not be able to read it that easily but I'm telling you also why it is important to have and how we're going to leverage it but first i'm going to show it to you so I'm just going to call that variable time stamp going to click okay we're going to run this whole thing again and as you can see now we have a time stamp right here which is literally just numbers so this translates to a specific date and you can do that directly inside of make.com by by formatting it back to a date or you can even use some other tools online we just search for time stamp to dat as you can see here and then we just click on EPO converter basically everyone can do that we're going to paste our time stamp right here and then you can see the exact same time that was defined which is now uh 22nd of June 2024 724 and that's interesting because now we search for the GMT and the time stamp is actually always defined in UTC which is another thing I mentioned in my previous video but inside of make.com and mostly any kind of technological thing we are using uh the coordinated universal time zone which is UTC so UTC is basically managed in the back end to kind of unify all the time zones so we can just work and and Branch them out to custom time zones whenever we need it right so we have a generalized setup of the time zone so that we have always something to work within all of our text stack so this is this time zone very important to mention and the good thing is that you can man manipulate it so let's for example say we want to add another day so we would probably do some calculations we probably say something like okay we have uh 60 seconds in 1 hour 60 minutes and then we have we have 24 of those so we have 86,400 seconds in a day right so what I would do now is basically I would just go into here and now I can for example set with a math calculator which is right here I can just add this whole number to it which now basically adds a no a whole another hour on top of this time stamp so this is the reason why we have time stamps in the first place because it allows us to do easy data manipulation on time stamps so we can use them and manipulate them to the future or the past or wherever we basically need it in a very simple and visual way so now if we going to check this time stem again so now as you can see right now we have the Saturday 22nd of June 2024 and now if I'm going to paste a new time zone I'm going to click enter you can see that it's now Sunday 23rd so we added a whole day to that based on the time zone or the time St that we defined here which just makes it easier for us again to manipulate time by the way this time zone can also be formatted or you can format them in between each other which I'm also going to show you in a second now let's add the next item oh and by the way before I'm adding the next item this scenario I know it's only one module but it's going to be available as a download directly inside of my resource up so if you're keen on having that and checking it out yourself what I created here feel free to Simply head head it over down in the description to h. ticus.com there's a link for our resource up you can simply sign up there it's for free I'm sharing all of my templates and everything I show on my YouTube channel for all of you for free so you can literally just use it and learn from it manipulate it use it in your own business whatever you want anyways that's it uh and with that out of the way let's just head back into it so now we have another thing which is the now variable which in my opinion is a very interesting one let me just paste it in here cuz this one is something that we use quite a lot uh the now variable is basically just a date time string so it's basically date and time formatted in a string with a specific time zone at the very end I've shown that in my previous videos too but for if you if you haven't seen it I'm going to show it to you now so we're going to call that date time string I'm going to click okay and I'm going to run the scenario again so now if we looking into it we can see daytime string and we can see a formatted time here so now you think okay this is weird you know it's a form at a time nice but this time has for example no time zone included right you can see no you cannot see a time zone here and I have to mention that this is it's really important to understand that this is the time zone that you see based on your time zone defined inside of your user profile so if you head inside of make.com down to your user profile you have a time zone defined there and this is a time zone that is a displayed here so if you want to see the actual time zone which by the way is also UTC time zone we need to go up here on this little on this little icon and we click on download output bundles and you can see the time zone right here for a visual way you can also just stay long on here and you will see a little popup coming which also shows the time zone but obviously we would like to copy it so I'm just going to head over here and you can see now it is a properly formatted time string and I'm just going to quickly go over it so you get an understanding of it we have first the year then we have the month and then we have the the days right here and it is always in that format because for one specific reason because it makes it easier to sort the dates at some given time right like this we have it hierar hierarchically that's the right word to use but you can imagine that it's like a number right the the lowest number and you have a lower number and you have a higher number and you kind of sort it that way and by defining the the highest number at the front Then followed by the month which also has a highest and the lowest number and then by the day you can format that in a great way so that it's always like in in a hierarchy going down to the older dates just a sorting formatting thing um just wanted you to know that then we have a t here which just determines the it's like the separator between the date and the time and it stands for the time so t for time then we have the hours we have the minutes and we have the seconds divided by double points and then you can see another weird thing right here which is a point and 631 which stands for the milliseconds so the milliseconds are defined with three digits right here which is not always the case sometimes you have it with two sometimes you don't have millisecs at all but you always have um the Z at the end for a proper date time stamp or date and time string the Z in that case stands for Zulu which is just another area or another location inside of the UTC time zone so that is basically a fast and easy definition for us to refer to the UTC time zone so Z always means you're in UTC you can literally just see that way Z equals UTC so with that time stream we basically know that this is in the UTC time zone so this is the time zone that make.com uses in the back end to as well manage its very own things which is really important to know cuz that is a time zone we also want to use for other text TS so let's for example say you're sending information somewhere else you want to make sure you format the date into the UTC time zone so that wherever else you send information to it is also in the UTC time zone or let's say you have a hopspot CRM and you have a specific time zone you need to set up an event you might be even able to reformat the time zone depending on the time zone you needed in just a small side note good with that out of the way we can head into the next part which is the actual functions so now we're basically heading over to that section and we have a couple of functions here so those ones are all fairly similar I would say and they all expect an either an A Time Zone like a a time date string a date time string or maybe even a uh time stamp so what we can do is we can basically add minutes and we can add years to it so I'm going to show you how this works as well so let's for example say we're going to click on the add years variable by the way all of them are the same at at add at everything you see here with at they kind of have the same functionality just depending on the amount of time or seconds you would like to increase so now we've added the add years I'm heading into the first part before the semicolon and now we can basically Define a time as you can see here or a date and time string so that would be probably the best case to use the now variable and now at the end we can also Define a a number as you can see here which is the amount of years in that case that we would like to add on top of it so let's for example say two I'm going to click okay I'm going to call it actually U date time plus 2 years going to click okay I'm going to run the scenario and now if we look into the time string you can see that we are talking about 2026 so it's basically two years in the future and we just did that by literally just using the add years function this is one way you obviously couldn't do it this way as well by just calculating the amount of seconds on a time stamp and then using a par date function to convert it but obviously this is the smarter and nether way it's easier to see and easier to understand and for you to manipulate as well but I just wanted to mention it because there are multiple ways that bring you to your goal depending on whatever works best for you all right then we're going to head another item we head back into the date functions and down here you can see a couple of more which says set seconds set minutes set hour and set day set date and set month so there are actually a couple of them and all of them do a very similar thing instead of adding something on top they set it to a predefined um year for example and it also gets a time a day time string as an input so we just going to use that same thing and we just going to call it set to 2028 for example so in our case we would like to for example say we're going to set our year inside of a Time string to 2028 so what we will do now is I basically just select the now variable and here for the number I'm going to set it to 2028 click okay and now if I run that you will see that the time is basically set to the year 2028 as seen here so in that case we basically didn't add anything on top we literally just defined it statically so it will always be 2028 this is just something neat if you want to generalize data or let's say you want to synchronize it with something else you want to strip things away all of those things are possible there are other ways that you can use for set as well you can for example use the next function I'm going to show you which is the form a date function so for that we just going to add another item down here and I'm going to click in the variable value field I'm going to go here and you can see the format date function so the format date function is just an an output basically you basically change the output of the string so that it is formatted in a different way than the time stamp that we have just defined in Zulu or in the UTC time zone so I'm just going to show you that here I'm just going to add this this now variable with a date time string again and now at the end here we can basically set a format as you can see here and we can even Define a time zone so by default I assume no one of you remembers the exact notations of the make.com setup so that case what we would do is we probably just head over to the documentation and you can see in the date and time functions they have have a format date definition which is basically whatever this format dat does you can read through that right here what is important for me right now is that we basically can format it so here's an example which we can even use and I'm going to do that but you also have the tokens for daytime formatting right here which is really important if you want to granularly break it down to a specific format that you require for your endpoints so as you can see here we have a lot of different tokens and those are the Tok tokens those are the ones we can basically use directly in that format string so that we can format the date in a given format so here as well we can January February November this is a nice one we can also try week and years hours and minutes so you have tons of definitions here to format the date in different ways and we can leverage that directly within here so now I'm just going to paste what I what I basically had from the example right here which is this one and now at the end just to show you that we can also customize it I'm also going to add a for the am PM definition and I'm also going to add the actual month name which is represented as 4 M's okay so now I'm going to say um customize dat time string format so in that case it's literally just as an example so you see how it works I'm going to press enter and you can see here now we have the whole definition in that format that we just defined you can see am at the end which was the A and we have the full name of the month which is June which also was defined by that 4 M that we just added you need to be uh aware that it's case sensitive by the way so if you go into here as well you can see that some are written in big and you'll also see that some are written in small they all have different meanings so make sure you check whether or not you have something written in capital or not all right heading back to our actual function we have one more that we need to check so I'm going to add another item we're going to call that um customized date par and this is another one that is very important especially if you deal with external formats and you want to format things to your format for that we have that par date function right here which basically just takes any kind of date format with a format that you define so it's important that the date that comes in has a format and you need to tell make what format that actually is so that make Con can convert it to an actual time string so and this can also be par then to a time zone depending on the output that you basically want right so how that would actually look let's for example say we're going to have a static date format that we can just actually let's just Lo use it from here so we can for example use this one this this is for example a nice one yeah I mean they're both nice actually let's just use that one so now let's say for example we actually get the following format back which now would just be a string right and it would not follow the the standard pars date setup so it would not know exactly what to do with it CU that is literally just a text and it doesn't follow any kind of date time stamp or string notation so for make.com figuring out what that exactly means it's incredibly hard because we would need to break strings down we need to try to figure out match things together and there's a high error rate so m.com actually has some really neat pre-build features that we can leverage for um parsing the date into an actual time stamp and I'm going to show you here how so first we have the word June right which stands for month so if we now back heading back into the tokens and we're going to go to the year and month section right here you can see that we have the whole month written out with the four M as defined which means since this is the the month written in uh in full we would Define it as mmmm so then the days are separated by a space so we add a space and then we have the days written two digits so that would be DD you can also confirm that right here by scrolling down DD you can see it is the two-digit notation of all of the days now since we have that I'm going to press space Cu uh no actually not space we have a comma as you can see after the days we have a comma and then we have a space and then we have the year I know the year is for y you can again just verify that with the tokens right here going up here why you can see it's a four-digit day a four-digit year then I'm going to head back in here I I can see there's another space between the time and now we have the hour and the minute so also you can see it here in this example for example Capital HH double Point small mm represents the minutes and the hours so what I would do is I'd write it that exact same way so it represents this kind of format then we have another space then we have the am definition which in my case would be a and now we're going to click okay cuz this is literally the represented format which means now this par date function can actually turn the string we have into a uh date time string string a properly formatted string based on the setup that we gave it right here or the formatting so I'm going to click okay I'm going to run the scenario and you can now see at the end that it doesn't look much different but if we going to look into the output bundles you can now see that it was actually turned into a Time string or a day time string now there's one more thing that is very important to mention right now you can see here that it says 11:36 a.m. but in the time St it says 7:36 a.m. why is that the case because make.com again formats the time zone depending on your organizational time zone so if we don't give it a specific time format it might format it in a different way than we expect it to so let's for example say we get that information as UTC right so we get this in the UTC time zone we need to define the time zone we can do this by going before the last bracket Addam semicolon and now we can just add the time zone which would be something like UTC right because we want to format it to UTC and I'm going to click okay now and I'm going to run this whole thing again you can see now that this one says 336 but now if you look into the output bundle we can see see that the time zone actually has been adjusted properly based on the actual input we gave it to that Zulu time zone so this is the perfectly format time zone that we now need and we can use directly inside of make.com as a UTC time zone to do all of the other manipulations perfect I think this is a lot of information to digest I definitely know there are tons of more things we could basically do we could do data manipulation we can use those functions internally to to combine them let's for example say we have we want to format a date to to a specific format and we want to get only get the month and so we're going to define the month here and then we would like to adhere a time stamp that is 4 years ahead so we would probably say something like add years we're going to add four years ahead and then I'm going to add the now time stamp I'm going to give it a name here random time test which doesn't really make sense because we will still be in the same month so actually instead of just making it plus I'm just going to copy this whole thing and I'm going to also add one more month so we can actually see a difference because otherwise the month will be the same so I'm going to add one month here and right in here I just paste again what I just copied which is the exact format so you can see I can basically Nest those functions and when I run it now I will see there's an arrow at M June is not a valid date okay that probably means because I already pre-formatted it which is what I should not do so the issue the reason why this is happening is because I have the format date right within here so we don't need that because the format date will basically just break things so what we do is you can see here I have now basically the add month and the at years which is great so I'm going to copy that and I'm going to add the for form a date function around that so right here bum bum bum bum for month and now I can just run this whole thing again now you can see it basically returns July even though it's June but this happens because we added one month and we added four years so if we would even output the year here we can just do that by this we will now see that all of the adjustments have actually been correct you can see July 2028 so this is the way how you can combine those functions to create more complex ways of manipulating your dates well that's all I got for you so far I really hope this helped you out like I mentioned this whole example will be available inside of my resource app so you can simply download it use it for yourself try it out if it works for your use cases and if there are any further questions you're most welcome to drop them down below in the comments that's all I got for now thanks for watching and see you next time

Channel: Jannis Moore | AI Automation

Views: 16

Keywords: make.com, date and time function in excel, make.com tutorial, make.com if function, if function make.com, make.com switch function, date and time functions in sql, make.com ifempty function, make.com date functions, make.com function, date functions, ifempty function make.com, make.com automation, make.com course, functions, make date and time functions, date function, make.com money, make.com tutorial for beginners, make.com guide, date and time functions in excel

Id: P4g59dxm5lA

Length: 20min 11sec (1211 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 16 2024