I'm using the openpyxl library in Python and I'm trying to read in the value of a cell. The cells value is a date in the format MM/DD/YYYY. I would like for the value to be read into my script simply as a string (i.e. "8/6/2014"), but instead Python is somehow automatically reading it as a date object (Result is "2014-08-06 00:00:00") I don't know if this is something I need to fix in Excel or Python, but how do I get the string I'm looking for?
I would suggest changing it in your Excel if you want to preserve what is being read in by openpyxl. That said, when a cell has been formatted to a date in Excel, it becomes altered to fit a specified format so you've lost the initial string format in either case.
For example, let's say that the user enters the date 1/1/2018 into a cell that is formatted MM/DD/YYYY, Excel will change the data to 01/01/2018 and you will lose the original string that was entered.
If you only care to see data of the form MM/DD/YYYY, an alternate solution would be to cast the date with date_cell.strftime("%m/%d/%Y")
Python: Reading Excel and automatically turning a string into a Date object?