Date formats you can display in Datawrapper

Once you've successfully uploaded your date column using a correct date format, you can choose how the date appears on your chart. On the Refine tab of the Visualize step for many charts, you have the ability to choose from a drop-down menu of date/tick formats:

Available date formats

Once you've successfully uploaded your data using a correct date format, you can choose how the date appears on your chart. On the Refine tab of the Visualize step for many charts, you have the ability to choose from a drop-down menu of date/tick formats.

Custom date formats

The last option in the drop-down is "custom." Once selected, you can use tokens to create your own date format.

Below is a table of the accepted custom date formats and how they will appear on your chart:

To create multi-line axis ticks, use the pipe symbol "|". The token before the pipe symbol will be displayed on the second line; the token after the pipe symbol on the first line. Here we use the custom format YYYY | MMM to display months (MMM) on the first line and years (YYYY) on the second line:

Combining custom tokens

By combining different tokens, you can create a custom date format. You can also use punctuation marks (commas, dots, slashes, etc) between tokens, which will appear on the chart. Here is an example of using a custom date format and how it will appear in your chart:

Since MM is the month number and YYYY the full year, our result is something like "01--2003" (the "--" appears because it is written in the tick format text box). Here is how it appears on a chart:

Use a different format for the first axis tick

You can make use of the syntax ~~ to specify a special format for the first axis ticks:

In this example, we use the format YYYY~~'YY to display the axis like so: 

You can combine tokens as you need them with the ~~ syntax. For example, you could use the custom format MMMM YYYY~~MMM to show the following axis ticks:

Localized Formats

Because preferred formatting differs based on locale, there are a few tokens that can be used to format a moment based on its locale. All of these tokens are affected by the Output Locale, which can be changed in the Check and Describe step or the Design tab of the Visualize step. The US and Germany are featured in the chart below.

Here is an example of how to use a localized format:

Using the example from before, if our Output Locale is set to English (en-US), the date will appear July 1, 2003. If the Output Locale is set to Deutsch (de-DE), the date will appear 1. Juli 2003. 

For more information about working with dates and times in Datawrapper, see this article.