Display UTC time in Glide App in users Local Time

[Anthony_Kelly]

I have read a number of post about capturing a user’s Local time in the data sheet.
But I have a realy basic issue - I wan’t to store in the data sheet a single timezone (UTC), and to use the user’s phone or computer’s Local Time setting to display that date and time in the User’s Local time zone - pretty basic, I should think - but why can’t Glide apps cope with this.
The column in the data sheet is formated like this 2022-07-25T02:55:00.0000Z, but it displays the date/time in UTC regardless of the users device settings.

[Jeff_Hager]

System/GMT Time - Solved!

This is an extension of the request for System Time, please. There’s been a lot of questions for a while about how to get a universal time that can be shared for multiple users across multiple time zones. Most of you will know that any time your get a date/time from one of the glide special values, it will always be the user’s local time. But if you don’t know which time zone they are in, then you have no easy way to convert that date/time into something standard, like Greenwich Mean Time, to…

[Anthony_Kelly]

Thanks, Jeff for your email. All of the topics in the discussion board, (and I have read many before now) are about converting a user input which is in UTC time-zone in the data sheet. I don’t want to convert UTC in the data sheet = it is already in this format in the datasheet - what I want it to do is display the correct local date/time on the app in the users time zone.

It is really difficult to find the answer to this on any of the Glide Help docs, - but your solution; of adding GMT to the UTC time works. I did have to change the date format to text
as “MM/DD/YYYY, hh:mm:ss GMT” - but whow! it works.

Thanks for your help!

Here is a picture of the app

and here is a link to the app - as I say it is read-only and open to anyone without sign-in - So it shoud be in your time-zone where ever you are!.

Live Games on TV

[Jeff_Hager]

I’m assuming it’s working. I’m in Central Time US.

[Anthony_Kelly]

Jeff – absolutely – I’ve been trying to figure this out for the last 18 months.

Thanks so much for you help on this.

My next big task, is to localize the TV channels –

Cheers

Anthony Kelly

68 Castleview Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 22, D22 YY42

M: +353 87 295 8667

[AZJR]

@Jeff_Hager @Anthony_Kelly → could you please enlighten me of the process: I do to have a time in google sheets stored as UTC (i.e. 2024-08-18T09:00Z) and even after reading this and the corresponding post, I’m not quite sure how to get this conversion to a local time - do I need to create additional columns in Glide with the math calc? Or is just enough to simply present (convert the UTC to the format as “MM/DD/YYY hh:mm:ss GMT” and it will automatically show the correct local time?

[Jeff_Hager]

This is a pretty old post. I think there are better ways now. I’m not near a computer at the moment to fully test, but you should be able to use a Format Date column to get your timezone offset.

Then use Math column to divide it by 24 to get a decimal representation of hours, as well as add that result to your date with another math column.

Date + (Offset/24)

If it works, you should end up with a date converted from UTC time to your local time.

[AZJR]

@Jeff_Hager – thanks for the quick reply! I dug deeper and based on the experimental field with plugins (Format Date column | Glide) I was able to just add the column (see screenshot) and reference the column with UTC date/time - and it looks like it works fine (I changed my system timezone to test it in MT and PT )

[AZJR]

… Bummer… – I spoke too soon
Column: DateUTC (text) with value: “2024-08-21T17:00Z” should return noon (I’m CDT) - but I’m getting Wednesday, August 21, 2024 at 10:00PM" (when double click on the value it shows: “2024-08-21T22:00:00.000Z”)
My offset time is -5hrs but the system returns +5 making it 10pm… any thoughts? this is little concerning…

[Anthony_Kelly]

You just have to change the sign if negative - make it positve, and vice versa.

I should point out that this new feature doesn’t work for me - I am storing the date/time in the table in UTC, and the APP automatically shows local time, based on the users time settings. The new feature requires calclulations in the data table - which I don’t want!

[Jeff_Hager]

@AZJR are you still doing it your way, or my way?

[AZJR]

… allright - I think I’ve got it now - and: @Jeff_Hager I’m using a combination, including your suggestion (thank you!!).

In general, here is what I found out:

• in a current version of glideapps the column type: “Date & Time” has a checkbox “Respect time zones” – this is helpful (in some scenarios) but:
  • if I use “Date & Time” column type, enter the UTC time (i.e. 2024-08-22T17:00Z and check the box, the system will interpret as 5PM in my time zone (CDT) - thus, if I change zone in my system (to let say MDT), the Local time will be shown as 4PM (not 11AM as I’d expect)

So: in my case where I have a UTC date/time stamp and want to correctly present it across the time zones, while keeping that field intact, here is what I did:

1. I kept my “matrix” date/time in text column: 2024-08-22T17:00Z (this one comes from google spreadsheet)
2. duplicated it as a separate “Date & Time” column, without checking the “Respect time zones”
3. created a TimeOffset column, using javascript: return -(new Date().getTimezoneOffset())/60, and finally
4. created Local_Date math column, using Jeff’s date + (TimeOffset/24) formula, where “date” is replaced with my “Date & Time” type column

whew…
Thanks all to chiming in!

Here are screenshots: