The end goal for my project is to schedule booked capacity in my business by importing from my Project Manager database. The imported data will include the department, the job number, the estimated and actual hours for that job, and the projected start and end date for that job.

Now step 1 of this project is to first fill in the cells with blank dates for the start and end date columns for two reasons. One, because if the dataset has any blanks in a date column then ZOHO will kill all the data in the column, and Secondly because sometimes our PM’s just make mistakes and forget to enter a date, so a default for today is helpful.

When there is a blank date, I want to use the “Prepare Data” to replace the blank cells with the current date of the import. I have images below for what I did. When I do this, in the “Prepare Data” preview the dates look like they are coming out correct, in the case of the image attached all the 2/15/2022 were blanks before and properly now filling in with today’s date (As of import it was 2/15/2022), and the dates that were not blank are untouched. So in the Prepare Data Preview everything looks good.

Now when I go to the ACTUAL table that was imported (the darker images) you can see where I have highlighted examples of the problems for reference. The first problem is that it didn’t even import today’s date into the blank cells (2-15-2022), instead it imported a date two weeks old (2-1-2022) (See highlighted job 949334T). The second problem is that jobs that HAD dates in cells and were NOT blank have been overridden with the wrong date (See job 949336T)

It doesn’t make sense to me that the Prepare Data produces a COMPLETELY different result than the actual import.

Please assist. Thank you