Incorrect Time Zone setting at Power BI Service

[raymondwkmok]

Hi there, it’s related to time zone issue. I’ve made the necessary setting at the Power BI Desktop that shows the time correctly in the desktop version at UTC+8:00.

The report at Power BI Service however shows the time back to UTC after I published it to the Power BI cloud service.

I’ve attempted to look for different setting at the Power BI Service but was not able to manage it. 

Please kindly advice me the way to change the time at Power BI Service back to UTC+8:00.

Many Thanks  

[ProfPlat]

Dear Prajwalkumar

The problem is getting the local user's time to Power BI. Power BI only shows UTC. In your answer above, it is the TIME(5,30,0) that needs to be sent to Power BI. This value will be different depending on where (and when for GMT/BST) the user is located, so it is not a fixed value. We want Power BI to know where the local user is, who is running the report.

Regards

ProfPlat

[ProfPlat]

I am using Power Apps (back end SQL with datetimeoffset) and embedding a Power Bi Paginated report, which resides on the Power Bi service. Power Apps deals with local time, summer time etc - Why is Power Bi Service in the dark ages/time? Anyway I found a Power Apps formula: TimeZoneOffset(Now()) which gives the mins offset from UTC for the local user. In the UK it deals with British Summer Time and GMT going from -60 (Summer) to 0 in Winter. When you embed a Paginated report it allows you have one text parameter that you can pass to Power Bi. By adding a large number (say 2000, so it is always 4 digits) and converting to text. I have appended this onto my existing parameter and pull it out in the Power Bi report, take 2000 away and then MINUS this to now(), and hey presto the user now sees their local time they ran the report not the UTC time. Hope you can find a way to use this until Power Bi Services gets up to date...

ProfPlat

[Burningsuit · Accepted solution]

Hi @raymondwkmok 

The Power BI service only operates in the UTC time zone, you need to adjust dates & times in DAX or Power Query.

There are lots of resources on this these few may help..

Dynamic time zone conversion using Power BI – The White Pages (unlimitedviz.com)

Power BI Service Time Differences and How to Fix It (linkedin.com)

Showing Current Time and Latest Refresh Time at Local Timezones in the Power BI Report - RADACAD

Hope this helps

Stuart

[Jays_D]

The fact that this is still an issue in Power BI is absolutely laughable.

We have a report that was built in PBI Desktop, highly complex (has over 60 date & time columns + multiple calculated columns off the back of them) and only realised this was an issue once it was published to service and the dashboard went through it's first refresh - minusing 10 hours as the data is in AEST.

If there was a way to solve for this (i.e. apply a blanket rule you could apply aross all date & time columns  in the dashboard to compensate the time difference) we would implement and continue with Power BI in our organisation, but to be told by Microsoft Support "just make a new calculated column for each" and "there is no other way" is utterly ridiculous response/resolution for an already data-intensive dashboard.

I sincerely hope Microsoft sees this and considers doing something about it. If my data in Dynamic365 is captured and presented correctly, it should be presenetd THE SAME when fed through PBI service - it is illogical to change the value from what it is/intended to be.

This specific case is now the basis of a discussion in our organisation of over 40,000 employees to move away from Power Platform (PBI specifically) back to Tableau as this was not an issue we faced using the same data sets. If an application captures data as:

02/11/2023 - 3:00pm

It should be presented as such, not manipulated, not require a custome column etc - it is a raw value which should be presenetd accordingly.

[afiqhaziq]

Do we have a solution for this now? Im still having trouble with this issue. All the data from my sharepointlist need to plus by 1 in power BI and with a lot of data it can get very confusing 

[MattRo]

Hello Stuart, assuming that I am publishing my report from Desktop to Service, does this mean that I can never have my date/time value displayed correctly in both places? I understand that I can use DAX/PQ make the date/time value accurate on service, but then it is displayed incorrectly when I have it displayed in desktop, right? Thanks!

[Prajwalkumar]

Found a simple Solution, 
Create New Measaure

Current UTC Time = UTCNOW()
it will ALWAYS displays result in UTC you can then modify it 

Current UTC Time = UTCNOW() + TIME(5, 30, 0)
it will add + 5 hours 30  min

If you have already existing dates then you can now do some calculations like +- for your results, use AI like chatgpt or geemini for that help