For anyone using or considering Tabulator, it has a "mutator" mechanism to help deal with this kind of thing. Incoming data is passed through a function that can then change it before it reaches the table. So if you've got an odd date format to deal with or a lookup value to dereference or something, then a mutator function can be added for that field. This is separate from formatters and editors that are also field-level mechanisms to change how the field is displayed and altered. By defeault, it guesses at all these things and does pretty well for a first pass. But as I was mentioning previously, javascript tends to see everything as either integers or strings so as soon as you try anything else you've got to roll up your sleeves and get to work 
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