timezone corrections on power BI service not the same as desktop report

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

Recently I've been having a (particularly annoying) issue where the adjustments I've made to my power BI Desktop report to account for the UTC timezone problem haven't been carrying across to the web service. I've used M code to make the adjustments from UTC 0000 to UTC +10 for Australia, but the web service seems to be back-converting them as if I hadn't made the changes at all. 

EDITED FOR CONTEXT: Below is the code I've used. It constructs custom columns with each of the adjustments. One to zone the original date time value, and another to alter the zone to UTC +10. 

//to add UTC timezone 0

DateTime.AddZone([Time Started], 0)

// to convert to Brisbane UTC +10

DateTimeZone.SwitchZone([TimeStarted_Zoned], 10)

I have already attempted to use the original date/time values without the zoning, and also with the zoning, and no automatic adjustments have been made by the web service to account for the UTC difference.  I've already tried adjusting browser languages and locations to no avail. 

Any suggestions on how to correct for the web service? 

[v-robertq-msft]

Hi, 

As far as I’m concerned, in Power BI Service, the now() function will return the UTC time. We can't set the time zone on Power BI Service. To get the correct local time, we can add time difference in your DAX formula, or use Power Query to get the local time zone DateTime. For more details, please refer to this link: 

Solving DAX Time Zone Issue in Power BI.

Thank you very much!

Best Regards,

Community Support Team _Robert Qin

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[TomMartens · Accepted solution]

Hey @Anonymous ,

it's important that we can not forget that every calculation requiring time depending calculations might return a different result if the calculation is executed on our Desktop or inside the Power BI Service. This difference is due to the fact that the service is using UTC, no matter where the data center is located that hosts your Power BI tenant.

Whenever there are calculations that are depending on functions like NOW(), a DAX function, we have to take the above mentioned fact into account.

Unfortunately, I do not fully understand your requirement, if the above mentioned fact is not sufficient to tackle your challenge please consider providing more information about your use case.

Regards,

Tom

[Shawn_Eary]

This "feature" is highly annoying. I've gone though a few Power BI posts and did some tricks to correct UTC time from Azure Table Storage back to CDT/CST as applicable. They work on the Desktop version and even work after I publish, but as soon as I refresh the dataset from the service side, my corrections get obliterated and I have to republish from the Desktop. Most of my users are in the Central Time zone so they aren't going to value UTC time.

This irritating Time Zone issue and the fact that I can only refresh from Azure Table Storage on a daily basis makes me seriously wonder why I'm not using Google Charts or some SVG toolkit...

[Anonymous]

@TomMartens thanks, I've been trying to find something that will adapt for the web version but no luck. Please see above for edits in the original post, I've added the code I used. I was avoiding DAX usage purely because of the NOW() functionality problem, but I'm starting to consider that this is a dataverse issue rather than a Power BI issue. Would importing the data already in the correct timezone get around this issue? i.e. hardcoding it as UTC +10 rather than without a timezone?