Time zone clarification needed

J. Craig Williams

I believe I have seen this question before but could not locate it either in the Community or in my notes. Apologies.

 

I am using the Smarter Business Process Smartsheet account. They are located in the UK.

I am currently in central Europe and my personal settings are set to the Berlin time zone.

Our customer is located in the Eastern USA (not important yet, but will be later)

 

The Modified column is showing my time zone. That's OK.

However, the DATEONLY() function is returning the UK date.

 

 

Is there any way to fix this so that the result of the calculation is based on the visible timestamp and not the value as defined on some server somewhere?

 

Thanks

Craig

Kennedy Stomps

Hi Craig-- Great question! I'm actually not sure on this, so I've reached out to our QA team to clarify what the sources for both of these values are. I'll either have them update here or update here personally once we have an answer.

J. Craig Williams

Thanks Kennedy.

 

Craig

Kennedy Stomps

It was brought to my attention that I never followed up on this! For future reference, here's a little more information: 

System columns in Smartsheet capture date/timestamps in UTC but display the value in the timezone set in your Personal Settings. When using a function like DATEONLY(), Smartsheet is going to pull in the captured value (in UTC) which may not reflect the date in the your timezone.

A potential workaround is using a formula to concatenate the date, rather than using the DATEONLY() function, i.e. =DATE(YEAR(Modified1), MONTH(Modified1), VALUE(LEFT(Modified1, 2)))​, changing the "Modified" value to reflect the name of your system column.

Hope this helps!