Calculated date does not trigger workflow when created using SharePoint Designer

I was recently creating an improved content review workflow using SharePoint Designer.

The scenario was that I wanted to send the author of the document an email 2 weeks before the review deadline and then another once the review date had arrived.

I setup 3 site columns:

• AuthoredBy – People / Group
• ReviewDate – Date and Time (Date Only)
• ReviewDateWarning – Calculated Field of Review Date – 14 (14 days / 2 weeks)  (See below)

Once the 3 columns were created I then opened up SharePoint Designer to start creating the workflow.

At first I thought my workflow was failing (and rightly so) because my condition was set to ‘to equal’ when it should have been set to ‘to equal (ignoring time). I changed this hoping that this was the problem so now my workflow looks like this:

Still no joy! When the workflow was triggered it just stated ‘waiting for DateReviewWarning’ even though the date was set to today's date. The picture below shows that the calculation of the date review working as expected but for some reason SharePoint does not see the calculated date as a native date field. When I replaced the field with the actual DateReview field and set this to today's date the workflow worked like a dream.

Unlike most of my blogs I didn’t find a fix to this but thought it was worth sharing the frustration I had when recently trying to implement this.

I’d be interested to hear from the SharePoint community on if other have managed to work round this (and I’m sure they have!).