Date/Time should be date and not text

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05-01-2017 08:44 AM
C_EHoward
Occasional Contributor III

Is there any plan to change how date/time fields are handled in Open Data? I know they are converted to string and I know that I have been told to create an equivalent text field so I can preserve the 'nice' looking date and time fields. But adding up to 3 extra fields to my data just to make it a user-friendly download is going to add some file size to tables that have millions of records. It adds a burden to users who download the data easily from your site to them have to manipulate fields back to a usable state if they want to do temporal analysis. 
I am looking for some guidance and best practices/instructions I can pass along to users who download our data so its not as misleading. The date field shows up great on the table preview but anything with time only gets changed to 12/30/1899 and anything with date and time gets changed to show only date. I know this is an issue throughout ArcGIS Online but all these 'big data' are often temporal in nature so it would be nice to have a more straightforward way to share than to create false fields just to make it look nice. Hopefully I am just missing something. thanks

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