title: R date parsing using read_excel function
body: <p>When using the read_excel function the dates in the spreadsheet, in the column FuelEventDateTime, are in format &quot;dd/mm/yyyy hr:mm:ss&quot; (example: 03/05/2019 9:19:00 AM) is parsed as a character string with a format like this: example: 43588.849xxxxx (being x any number). I cannot set this column to the correct date class, and I don't know what that number can mean but have seen it several times in Excel.</p>
  <p>Tried to separate the &quot;.&quot; in the character string, set the column as.numeric, and tried several functions in lubridate, R base and anydate library, as maybe that number is a date in epoch format in origin &quot;1900-01-01&quot;</p>
  <p>Read data</p>
  <pre class="lang-r prettyprint-override"><code>sys_raw &lt;- read_excel(&quot;Advanced Fill-Ups Report 15052019_165240.xlsx&quot;, sheet = &quot;Data&quot;, col_names = FALSE) 
  
  col_names_sys &lt;- sys_raw[11,] 
  
  sys_tidy &lt;- sys_raw[12:ncol(sys_raw),] %&gt;% 
    setNames(col_names_sys) %&gt;% 
    select(DeviceName, FuelEventDateTime,FuelUsedEventDistance)
  </code></pre>
  <p>Noticed the character string as numbers, tried separate &quot;.&quot; and set as numeric</p>
  <pre class="lang-r prettyprint-override"><code>sys_tidy &lt;- sys_tidy %&gt;% 
  
    mutate(FuelEventDateTime = str_split(FuelEventDateTime, &quot;\\.&quot;)) %&gt;% 
  
    separate(FuelEventDateTime, c(&quot;c&quot;,&quot;date&quot;,&quot;time&quot;)) %&gt;% 
  
    separate(DeviceName, c(&quot;Device&quot;), sep = &quot;\\s&quot;) %&gt;% 
  
    select(Device, date, FuelUsedEventDistance) %&gt;% 
  
    mutate(date = as.numeric(date)) 
  
  sys_tidy &lt;- sys_tidy %&gt;% 
  
    as.Date(date, origin = &quot;1900-01-01&quot;) 
  </code></pre>
  <p>Actual results of this are errors, the expected result is a column date with a date class in the format &quot;dd/mm/yyyy&quot;, don't need time.</p>
  <p>Example of error messages:</p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>Error in as.Date.default(., date, origin = &quot;1900-01-01&quot;) :do not know how to convert '.' to class “Date”</p>
  <p>Error in as.POSIXct.default(., date, origin = &quot;1900-01-01&quot;) :do not know how to convert '.' to class “POSIXct”</p>
  </blockquote>