Power Automate Date & Time Formatting Guide (Part 2 of the Working Hours Series)

Ever opened your Excel sheet and wondered why the dates look like they’ve been written by a robot from the future? You’re not alone. Tracking working hours is great—until the timestamp shows up looking like a secret code.

In my last post, we set up the “Track Your Working Hours” template in Power Automate. Today, we’re taking it one step further and fixing those weird-looking dates with formatDateTime in Power Automate.

In this post, you’ll learn how to add timestamps to your Flow, making them clean, readable, and actually satisfying to look at—so your attendance tracking finally makes sense.

Previously, we prepared our Excel sheet so it works correctly with Power Automate.
The next step is choosing the right dynamic content — starting with the timestamp.
If we create just one column in our Excel sheet for the timestamp (we’ll add more columns for extra options in the next blog post), here are the options we’ll get in our Flow.

• DateTime Format – you can ignore this for now.
• Timestamp – this is the name of the column we created in our Excel sheet.

• After that, click on Timestamp, type " / ", and you’ll see two more options appear 😁
  1. Insert Dynamic Content
  2. Insert expression
• Choose ” Insert Dynamic Content “

• On the right side, a dynamic panel displays all the available content for your flow.
  • This panel allows you to insert values such as timestamps or any other fields.
  • you can scroll through the list to find the value you need, or if it’s not visible, simply type it into the search bar—like “Timestamp”—to locate it quickly.
  • otherwise click on See more will reveal additional dynamic content options that can be used in your flow.
  • Once you’re done, go ahead and save your flow—and that’s it! Your Power Automate workflow will start running normally from now on 😄
    

After Saving the Flow: Where Can You Find and Use It?

There are actually several places where you can find your saved flow, but let’s focus on the most important one for this workflow — the Power Automate app on your phone.

Once you save the flow, it will appear in the Instant Flows section, just like this:

FormatDateTime in Power Automate 🕑: Do We Need to Customize Date & Time or Leave the Template As Is?

If we don’t make any edits to the date and time in the template, it will appear like this in our Excel Sheet: “2025-11-20T05:11:55.8785748Z”.

What on earth is that? 😂 It looks like a random string of numbers and letters, and we’d have to guess what each part even means!

Turning That Weird Timestamp Into a Clear Date & Time.

To do this we have to use Expression to format it the way we want.

Think of it like a puzzle — you can arrange it however you like. You set the format you wish for… and Power Automate makes it happen.

Let’s take our first example using Expressions and adjust it step by step.

Instead of clicking on Insert Dynamic Content, we are going to use Expression.
The function we need is: formatDateTime(value, format, locale)

Let’s break this down:

Value: Here we insert the dynamic content Timestamp — this is the value we want to format.

Format: How we want our Date & Time to appear.

Locale: This defines the language and regional format in which the Date & Time will be displayed.

• After choosing formatDateTime, go to the Dynamic Content panel on the right and select Timestamp (The Value) again. It will appear like this:
  
  formatDateTime(triggerOutputs()?[‘headers’]?[‘x-ms-user-timestamp’])
  
• Afterwards, we need to set our desired format. For example:
  
  ‘dd/MM/yyyy’
  
  At the end, the complete expression will look like this:
  
  formatDateTime(triggerOutputs()?[‘headers’]?[‘x-ms-user-timestamp’],’dd/MM/yyyy’)
  
  This expression will give the result: 10/12/2025
  
• Here’s another example using the Region parameter:
  
  “formatDateTime(triggerOutputs()?[‘headers’]?[‘x-ms-user-timestamp’],’d.MMMM yyyy’,’en-us’)”
  
  The result will be: 10.December 2025

There are hundreds of variations for how Date & Time can appear in Power Automate.
I’m not going to spoil all the possibilities for you—where’s the fun in that? 😉

You now know the basics, so go ahead and experiment with different formats and enjoy exploring what you can create!