When importing participants from Excel, any column mapped to a date field (such as date of birth, passport expiry date, or any participant custom field of the type "Date") must be formatted as Date in Excel — not Text or General.
Qondor checks whether the Excel column is of the type Date. It does not check what the date string looks like. If the column is formatted as Text or General, the import will fail with the error: "Excel columns mapped to date fields must have format Date".
How to format your date column
First, select the cells that contain date data. Right click and select Format Cells...
In the Number tab, select Date from the Category list. Then click OK and you are ready to import.
You can use any display format in Excel (e.g. dd.mm.yyyy, yyyy-mm-dd, mm/dd/yyyy) — Excel stores the date internally as a number regardless of how it is displayed, and it is the internal type that Qondor checks.
💡 PRO-TIP: After changing the format, verify that the values are actually recognised as dates. In Excel, dates are typically right-aligned in the cell. If your values remain left-aligned after formatting, Excel still treats them as text.
Common pitfalls
Data imported from another system often lands as Text even if it looks like a date. You must actively select the column, change the format to Date, and confirm that the values convert correctly.
A cell showing a date string that is left-aligned in Excel is still Text and will cause the import error. Re-enter the value or use Excel's Text-to-Columns feature to force conversion.