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Handle local time zone in Power BI service

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Curtis Ramirez on 03 Nov 2017 21:14:52

As of now, the reports that I create on desktop utilize a lot of time intelligence functions and relative date filters. This is completely fine so long as I view the report on the desktop. Once I publish the report up to the service and then utilize those visuals in dashboards I run into this issue. All of my time intelligence functions (TODAY & NOW) and relative date filters convert to UTC.

This issue causes my data to roll over to the next day 5 hours early which affects all of my subscriptions.

It would be absolutely fantastic if Power BI service could recognize local time zone or even if we could manually set our time zone so that these measure work correctly.

Comments (69)
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on 10 Oct 2023 23:15:48

RE: Handle local time zone in Power BI service

Currently working with a report that has a complex data structure, consisting of over 50 date&time columns coming from Dataverse.Had a phone meeting with Microsoft US and was advised there is no way to address this in service without creating new date&time columns and applying the correct time zone. An absolute appalling outcome for what should be a very basic function. If my data is stored as AEST, it should be displayed in Service as AEST.To go now and duplicate 50+ columns just to show the correct time zone is not feasible, particular due to all the custom calculations etc that are built against the original/existing columns. This is truly becoming a decision on whether or not this platform is reliable to stay with or return back to Tableau.

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Hoi Yin (Eric) Cheung on 08 Nov 2022 14:20:24

RE: Handle local time zone in Power BI service

How does Microsoft, which works on the west coast, deal with this issue? Relative dates would reset at 4pm for them, which is clearly before the workday ends. If they're not dealing with it, that means dashboards/stream data are basically not being supported.

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Ken Kirkner on 18 Jul 2022 18:04:50

RE: Handle local time zone in Power BI service

Extremely frustrating. My CEO can't believe there's not an easy fix for him. Doesn't believe MS would force everyone to run their reports using UTC. I had to nicely tell him...research it, it's true. I can't believe it either.Microsoft, It's time to give us an easy fix for selecting time zones!

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Jonathan Prendergast on 20 Apr 2022 13:05:37

RE: Handle local time zone in Power BI service

This may not be helpful for all of you, but hopefully at least one of you may benefit from this. I had built out reporting for a customer who needed to be able to view their Outlook Calendar meetings, specifically the meeting subject along with the date/time, in a Power BI report. Originally I had developed a solution that connected directly to their Outlook Calendar to pull in the meeting information. This is where I ran into the pain point some of you are experiencing. I tried converting the date/time within the report using a variety of strategies I found online but no matter what, publishing the report to Power BI service would convert meeting times back to UTC. After thinking outside the box, I found that using a SharePoint Online List date/time field allows for showing your desired time/zone in Power BI Service. If you are able to leverage Power Automate to populate the SPO List with the data you need, or create some sort of static list to, you could then connect the list to your BI report and display the date/time in the format you need. Hope this helps someone!

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Oskari Lager on 30 Mar 2022 05:58:42

RE: Handle local time zone in Power BI service

Without this, my shared online reports are useless, because their datetime is shown in UTC, which makes no sense to my clients.

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Heidi Croft on 04 Mar 2022 22:23:05

RE: Handle local time zone in Power BI service

This seems like such an oversight. Converting from UTC to current time, while considering daylight savings time, should be an out of the box basic feature.

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Rory B on 14 Feb 2022 18:56:28

RE: Handle local time zone in Power BI service

How has it been 5 years and this pretty obvious issue hasn't been addressed yet?

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Dmitrii Dmitrii on 28 Jan 2022 07:13:35

RE: Handle local time zone in Power BI service

This is an epic issue.Please make time zone control for streaming data.I'm connecting to DQ and I can't apply the time zone formulas.My problem is here

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Aaron M on 22 Jan 2022 02:30:45

RE: Handle local time zone in Power BI service

Can we get this please?

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Robert Tisley on 10 Jan 2022 21:47:01

RE: Handle local time zone in Power BI service

Yes we really need this to be actioned
Also in New Zealand but producing reports that will be used in different time zones so don't want to have code date tables for different situations when this should be standard.