R script in Power BI returns date as Microsoft.OleDb.Date

Question

I'm trying to transform a table in Power BI using the Run R Script functionality in Edit Query. The source of the table is a CSV file with a column of dates of the format 2017-01-04 (yyyy-mm-dd):

2017-01-04

2017-01-03

2017-01-02

2017-01-01

2016-12-31

2016-12-30

2016-12-29

2016-12-28

2016-12-27

2016-12-26

2016-12-25

2016-12-24

2016-12-23

2016-12-22

Using Get Data, Power BI shows the same date column like this: 

And after opening the Edit Query window, the very same date column still looks like this:

However, when trying to run an R script with the same data, the column only consists of the "values" Microsoft.OleDb.Date like this:

The R script I'm running is simply:

# 'dataset' holds the input data for this script

output <- head(dataset)

If I try to change the data type, an error is returned:

 

It all seems very strange to me, and I haven't found a reasonable explanation using Google.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

• Steps which are applied in Power BI and the resulting date column should look like this:  

• These are the details:

  • After loading the data from the CSV file, go to Edit Queries and change the data type to text

• Run the R script
• we need to change the datatype back to date once the script has provided an output.

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