Man did I ever spend a lot of time trying to figure this one out! I found so much stuff out there with other folks having exactly the same problem, and although there were a few different solutions posted out there none of them worked for me.
First, the problem: I was using the Hootsuite bulk upload feature and some of my dates had single digits in them: May 8th, 2012 looked like 8/5/2012 but it needed to look like 08/05/2012 in order for the bulk upload file to be accepted. Every time I saved the file as csv things would re-adjust themselves and the file wouldn’t be accepted.
Finally way down deep within a long thread of replies somewhere (I can’t even remember where now, I looked at so many!) I finally tried out a suggestion that did the trick and now works without fail. Here’s what I now do to make Hootsuite bulk-uploads work when using a Mac:
1. Start out with a regular spreadsheet and enter in all the info that you’re needing, and when it comes to dates that have a single digit simply type the single quote first and then the cell will remain as text exactly how you type it. This will make sure that we have 08/05/2012 instead of 8/5/2012
2. When you’re all ready to roll and you’ve got all your info in the spreadsheet, go to Save As and instead of choosing CSV, choose MS-DOS CSV
3. Upload your file to Hootsuite and everything works just fine and dandy.
So that’s it, saving the file as a MS-DOS .csv instead of a regular .csv before uploading to Hootsuite is the solution.
Great article, but I wanted to point out that the date format suggested is incorrect. May 8, 2012 should be written as 8/5/2012 or 08/05/2012. See how the Day and Month are reversed?
Whoops, good catch Patrick! I’ve fixed it up now, sorry for the confusion!