Hopefully you will have some spare time to go through this post. Recently I’ve been playing with time fields in Power Automate and it has been a struggle when times in systems don’t match my local time. Calculations often don’t make sense and it is important to offer the user the right time rather than the time used by a system.
Time in Flow
In flows, times are looked at as a text. So there is nothing clever about it. No complicated data structures. Just text!
An example of a time:
2019-09-05T13:43:28.1925648Z
Well this is not very helpful is it? No clue which time zone we are in. But there is help just around the corner. I created the following flow
When I ran my flow I found that the Timestamp was one hour out. ( My local time zone the London)
Converting time zones
There is a convertTimeZone function available in Flow.
The function takes 3 parameters.
- A time
- A source time zone
- A destination timezone
The above 3 ingredients is all you need to make time travel happen. Wow, this is easy! Something like the following just simply works:
convertTimeZone(outputs('Compose'),'UTC','GMT Standard Time')
Now you just need to know what all the time zones are called. Luckily Microsoft has documented all the time zones.
Pieter Veenstra
Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There's a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I'm the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I've been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. SharePains is not just any blog run by a Microsoft MVP. Have you ever used Try-Catch in Power Automate? The original post about Try-Catch in Power Automate can still be found on this site, https://sharepains.com/2018/02/07/try-catch-finally-in-power-automate-flow/ Or have you ever used the Pieter’s method to avoid variables and speed up your flows? https://sharepains.com/2020/03/11/pieters-method-for-advanced-in-flows/ You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com
good post! I needed that a few months ago and struggled too.