Dear Power BI Development Team,
After 4 years of WAITING for a proper answer on DateTimeZone Desktop vs Service, when will you add the needed function? Here are the many problems you would find if you tried to walk in the customers shoes for this:
- A lot of customers like us, only have one timezone
- Timezones have daylight savings time, which means at one time it is -7 or times it is -8
- We created something for the desktop which has as a Local value different than the PBI Service value for a refresh.
- When you work a table of dates and time, you need to transform every value seperately because of daylight savings differences, something could be in the winter and other datetimes could be in the summer. (AKA very slow refresh)
- The users live in the real world, not on a military based, so we need to show local time.
- The community has had to create all kind of look up tables and query web services - WHY?
- Do you see this crazy table? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#List_of_UTC_offsets and this Daylight saving time by country - Wikipedia
- Someday in the future, we will stop using Daylight savings, then all the code will need to concern that year as well.
- (And I will stop ranting now)
Here are some possible solutions for you to consider
- How about a SetLocalZone function to force PBI Service to a Timezone Name : not a number, PDT or PST, they have implications which to include daylight savings or not include.
- Or allow us to past a text value to SwitchZone to get a local daylight saving aware value back.
- Or give us a format option which allows a DateTimeZone value to be formatted to a specific daylight aware timezone
Please and Thank you for your taking time to read this. I loved PBI so much I bought it for everyone in the company.
(Please Kudos this up so we can get this function the attention it needs)
Thanks
