Your locale impacts display and ingestion of numbers and dates. This setting determines the display format of the day dividers in your notebook entries and date and datetime fields in structured tables, simple tables, and the registry. Your locale also ensures your number and date formats are interpreted correctly during data ingestion.
Benchling recognizes common numerical group delimiters, like commas, decimals, and spaces, so numbers are automatically converted from your localized format to the Benchling display format. Dates are displayed according to your specified locale.
If dates display incorrectly or in an unfamiliar format, you can update your locale in your user settings.
Note: At this time, Benchling is only available in English.
Update your locale
To update your locale:
- Click your avatar in the bottom-left corner.
- Click Settings in the menu under your name.
- Enter or select your locale.
- Click Save Changes.
How your locale affects importing spreadsheets
Your locale impacts the number and date formats Benchling can interpret, but these depend on the import method you choose.
Copying and pasting data into a structured table
Benchling automatically reformats dates and numbers as necessary. If you select an international locale in your user settings, dates and numbers are interpreted based on the locale supported formats. Dates display according to your locale and numbers display with periods as the decimal delimiter. For example, one thousand is 1000.00.
Importing a spreadsheet to a structured table
When importing a spreadsheet into a structured table, you can view the specified spreadsheet locale in the Import pop-up window. To import data in a format different from the one associated with your locale, select a new locale in the pop-up window.
If you prefer number and date formats not associated with your locale, Benchling saves the most recently-used locale in this window. At this time importing spreadsheets is the only method for uploading dates and numbers in a format not matching your locale.
Uploading a spreadsheet to a Lab Auto output file processor
When uploading a spreadsheet into an output file processor on a Lab Auto run, the run interprets the numbers and dates in the spreadsheet according to the locale specified in the Run schema configuration.
To set the locale for each run created using a specific Run schema:
- Go to theRun schema configuration page.
- In the Configure spreadsheet locale section (step 6), select your locale from the Locale drop-down menu.
- Click Update.
Supported date formats
You can view the supported dates formats for all locales below.
- 'D MMM YYYY', 12 Nov 2022
- 'D-MMM-YYYY', 12-Nov-2022
- 'D-MMMM-YYYY', 12-November-2022
- 'D.MMM.YYYY', 12.Nov.2022
- 'DMMMYYYY', 12Nov2022
- ‘YYYY/M/D’, 2022/11/12
- ‘YYYY.M.D’, 2022.11.12
- ‘YYYY-M-D’, 2022-11-12
- 'M/D/YYYY', 11/12/2022
- ‘M/D/YY’, 11/12/22
- ‘M-D-YYYY’, 11-12-2022
- ‘M-D-YY’, 11-12-22
- ‘M.D.YYYY’, 11.12.2022
- ‘M.D.YY’, 11.12.22
Abbreviations:
- MMM - three-letter month, Nov
- MMMM - fully written out month, November
- YY - two-digit year, 23
- YYYY - four-digit year, 2023