Date-time field - set a time & timezone to be shown for all users

[StephanRyatt]

For date-time fields, I’d like to be able to pick a timezone that’s shown for all Fibery users.

Let’s say I pick ‘UTC’ and set ‘13:00’, then a user in ‘GMT+2’ and in ‘GMT+4’ will both see ‘13:00 (UTC)’

Here is how this feature is implemented in Airtable:

From reading other related threads, I understand your current approach: ‘each user ‘thinks’ in their timezone’. And in a lot of cases that makes sense! But for some use cases you need to be able to set a time for a specific timezone, where all Fibery users see the same time.

In our case we’re developing an order management system and when the customer submits an order, they supply a specific time along with their order, which is relative to their timezone. Since we’re not able to set the supplied time in the customer’s timezone (server-side it gets set to UTC), this time / timzone needs to be unified across all Fibery users sitting in different timezones. Otherwise each Fibery user looking at that particular order will see a different time - that actually doesn’t reflect the truth (the customer’s timezone)! And when they try to coordinate this amongst each other or with the customer, it will create a royal mess, because each user sees it in their timezone instead of the customers.

Are any others interested in this feature as well? What use case would this solve for you?

[StephanRyatt]

And here’s how the field looks like in Airtable, after the toggle (shown above) has been set:

[Chr1sG]

Here’s our current thinking

Twitter post about potentially new Fibery settings

Here is how we think about date localization problems: [image] And here are the principles we’ll strive for: Adapt date & time for each person individually Rather than assuming a company-wide standard, we acknowledge that even teammates might have different preferences, so we format date and time per user across Fibery. Be clear and unambiguous When displaying time, we always specify the time zone. When it’s the usual one, the indicator is unobtrusive (e.g. on hover); when the time zone d…

At the moment, per-field timezone settings are not in plans.

[StephanRyatt]

Ok, understood.

Can vote for this feature somewhere?

[Chr1sG]

We track these community topics, so the activity here allows us to gauge interest, without necessarily needing you to ‘vote’.

[njyo]

Hi,

Just came across this as I was dealing with timezones… again.

Here’s what I would like (and I think it would align with @antoniokov’s post):

1. In field labels show a little timezone info, e.g. in a property called Timestamp, the table header would display Timestamp (UTC+8) so everybody knows that this is a local time.
2. Allow me to define Date & Time property to always display as UTC for everybody. Useful for things like deployment timestamps, etc. and in that case it could show a small (UTC) next to the label.

It just makes things explicit for all users on what’s going on.

Thanks!

[antoniokov]

Both are great suggestions, thanks!
With enough demand, they’ll find their way into the product.

[YvetteLans]

I also recently contacted support because we are going to onboard our first two digital nomad clients next month. For them all time zone issues are also really important.

I’m really hoping this will be solved one day

Twitter post about potentially new Fibery settings

Here is how we think about date localization problems: [image] And here are the principles we’ll strive for: Adapt date & time for each person individually Rather than assuming a company-wide standard, we acknowledge that even teammates might have different preferences, so we format date and time per user across Fibery. Be clear and unambiguous When displaying time, we always specify the time zone. When it’s the usual one, the indicator is unobtrusive (e.g. on hover); when the time zone d…

And in the meantime this will prevent questions and a lot of frustrations I think.

@njyo

In field labels show a little timezone info, e.g. in a property called Timestamp, the table header would display Timestamp (UTC+8) so everybody knows that this is a local time.

[njyo]

I’d hope #1 is fairly small and simple refinement.