Hi Workiva Community! 👋

We've built a free tool to solve one of the most common headaches in Wdata and Chains: getting date formats right. Whether you're creating a new Wdata table or writing a date transformation in Chains, finding the correct format string can be frustrating.

https://towerturn.com/tools/datetime-helper

Common scenarios this helps with:
• Setting up a new Wdata table and your dates aren't importing correctly
• Building a Chain to transform dates between different formats
• Figuring out the right format for dates with timezones or milliseconds
• Handling ambiguous date strings (like 01-02-2025 - is it Jan 2nd or Feb 1st?)

How it works:
1. Paste your date string (e.g., from your source data or desired output format)
2. The tool uses AI to analyze the format and shows you:
   - For Wdata Tables: The correct Java SimpleDateFormat pattern
   - For Chains: The proper strftime format code

Features:
• AI-powered format detection (with confidence indicators)
• Live preview to verify the format works
• Interactive token reference table
• Built-in disambiguation tips
• Support for complex formats (timezones, milliseconds, etc.)

Example:
Input: "2025-09-05T14:30:05-05:00"
- Wdata: yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssz
- Chains: %Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z

The tool is completely free to use, no registration required. We've aligned all formats with official Workiva documentation and extensively tested with real-world data scenarios.

Found a date format that's not detecting correctly? Let us know! We're actively gathering feedback to make the tool even better.