Have you ever wanted to show your time data in different time zones simultaneously? Or allows users of the same report to display time values in their own time zone? This article outlines one approach for doing so.
If you’ve spent much time building reports for users in more than one time zone, you’ve likely come across a few of the idiosyncrasies of Power BI and date/time values. In fact, if you’ve worked with time zone values in Power Query and you don’t happen to live in the UK) , you’ve likely noticed that your reports show different time based values when they get published to the service. This is because the Power BI service operates in the UTC time zone, and evaluates all locale based time functions in that time zone. Power BI Desktop evaluates them according to the locale of the user.
For that reason, UTC date/time values are paramount. Luckily, most source data is available in UTC format, and it’s up to report designers to convert it as necessary. However, what happens when a single report is meant to serve users in different time zones? Alternatively, what if you want to use a single data model to serve reports in different time zones?
Time calculations can be performed both in Power Query, and in DAX. However, if we want our users to be able to to select their time zone from filters or slicers, we’re going to be restricted to using DAX. We’re also going to need a good source of time zone data. In the end, we need the time offset from UTC so that our time calculations can adjust time accordingly.
One good source of time zone offset is the Time Zone Database. You can register for an API key (its free), and call it directly using Power BI’s web connector. This means that when we refresh our data, we will get up to date offset data when daylight saving time changes, or there are local changes to the time zone rules.
To retrieve the time zone data, connect to it using Get Data in Power BI Desktop, then select the Web connector. If prompted, choose “Anonymous” as the authentication type, and enter the following for the url:
http://api.timezonedb.com/v2.1/list-time-zone?key=XXXXXXXX&format=json
Where key is the API key that you received when registering at the Time Zone Database.
As of October 2020, Power Query will then convert the resultant JSON data into a simple table. Some of the columns are unnecessary, and we can safely remove status, message, and timestamp. I like to rename the columns into something a little more user friendly. The offset value returned in in seconds. DAX does its date calculations in days, so I create another column with the same value converted to days (the listed value divided by 86,400). It’s also a good idea to rename the query. When complete, your table should look something like below.
At this point, we can select Close and Apply to load the data into the model.
Our report will show the current time for any selected time zone. We therefore need to know which time zone is selected. We will assume that a filter or slicer, or a row filter has been applied, and there is only one currently selected value. We need to use an aggregate function in order to return the offset value, so in this case, we will MAX. We can therefore create a calculated measure to hold the selected offset value:
Current Offset = MAX('Time Zones'[Offset (days)])
Next, we need the current time. DAX has a Now() function that will return this value, but it will be returned in the locale of the user. When it runs on the service, it will return UTC time. We want this to work properly everywhere, so instead of Now() we will use UTCNow() which always returns the current time in UTC. We will next create two calculated measures – Current time (UTC) and Current time (Local).
Current Time (UTC) = UTCNOW() Current Time (Local) = UTCNOW() + [Current Offset]
Now we can add a slicer to our report page, and use the “Zone ” dimension. Next, we add two card slicers, one displaying the current time in the UTC time zone, and the other will display the current time in the zone selected in the slicer. It’s a good idea to use the slicer’s selection control to “Single select” to prevent multiple zones from being selected. Every slicer selection will update the two “clocks” and the local time should reflect the currently selected time zone.
To see row filters in action, simply open a new page, and add a table that displays the Zone name (and any other relevant dimensions) along with the Current time (Local).
Given that the fact that slicer selections and filter values can be selected by users and persisted, this allows a single report to be used my multiple users in different time zones, but these users can see the data in their own local time zone right in the Power BI service.
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