It would be great to set a timezone on a per-base or per-account basis. So, if you have collaborators in separate timezones, you’ll always see dates and times in the chosen time zone, but don’t have to deal with offsets from GMT.

This needs to be implemented as a very high priority.

We are considering introducing airtable to our business, with the intention of rolling it out across multiple departments.

But this would legitimately be a deal breaker

Requiring coding per column to avoid date and time zone confusion is not acceptable from a usability standpoint, for what should be a relatively simple and regularly used task. I would be able to personally live with the workaround, but it’s already a hurdle to get some of the less technically minded in the business on board without unneccessary roadblocks for a function that even the least technically minded will need to use on a daily basis.

I agree! This is basic design. This is a project management tool with a ridiculous design flaw. WHY would I pay money monthly for a product that cannot perform such a rudimentary function?! It is NOT connecting with my local time zone, it is 2 hours (and a few minutes) off! How can I collaborate with team members and plan events and programming with a calendar/clock from another time zone?

Agree. Although we can use a formula to convert GMT time to a different local time, the calendar view does not allow us to use this formula field as a start date or end date. There is no way to view a right calendar with right time.

You can use any formula field as a start date or an end date for the calendar, if the formula actually results in a date/time format. You can tell if you’ve created your formula correctly by seeing if the formula gives you a “formatting” tab that has changeable date/time options in it.

In the meantime, until Airtable gives us more time zone control:

For anybody struggling with time zones, I have created a demo video & sample base which walks you through the entire process of using time zones in your system here:

I know this is an old topic, but I’m new to Airtable and it’s just maddening.

I’m in California, and it’s 7PM on March 4. I run an API call to update a record using a {Date}=TODAY() query, and the record for March 5 is updated. If I’m on a computer set to Pacific time, using a database that’s seemingly in Pacific time (if I type NOW() into a date field, it inputs the current date and time in Pacific time zone). I’ve read of the “use the same time zone for all collaborators” setting, but it’s only an option if I turn on the time in my date field, which I don’t want.

Airtable is so powerful and easy to use, but it’s a thing like forcing me to wrap every date in a function or have phantom formula columns that are just there to set a time zone that make me question if it’s worth the trouble.

UPDATE: I changed the query function from {Date}=TODAY(), which seems to ignore the user’s time zone, to just sending the query {Date}='2021-03-04T00:00:00.000Z'.

It’s a couple extra steps pre-query to get the current day and format it correctly, but it is a good enough workaround to Airtable’s current (and apparently long-standing) limitations on time zone support.

Hello…hello…Airtable…have you heard this feature request?

Tap, tap, tap…HELLO…echo…echo…echo…

I guess not…

Any update on this problem? I’m in Australia and a simple month(today()) function doesn’t update until we’re many hours into a new month.

Because formula fields are calculated on Airtable servers and must store the same value for everyone, and users can be in multiple time zones, formula fields use GMT by default. This is unlikely to change.

Try using SET_TIMEZONE in your formulas that do not return only full dates. (If the result is only a full date, the format options can take care of the timezone.)

Note that TODAY will still take several minutes to an hour or so to update.

This is one of the most ridiculously lacking features I’ve seen. I’m trying to use airtable to manage activity in a building. The times are only ever in that building’s time zone but there appears to be no way (without some weirdly complex formulas and extra fields) to ensure that dates will be right, especially if one of our team leaves the country.

@kuovonne what do you mean by this? Is there a way that we can get dates to show up in our local timezone using the format options? I would like to use ISO dates in the Pacific timezone.

There are date fields and date/time fields. For date/time fields, you can set the timezone in the field settings.

For date-only formula fields, the time is midnight GMT. Tell the date-only field to use the same time zone for all users to show the date.

This drives me nuts! Another problem is that I've managed to get all of my fields looking good in Airtable, but then I made an automation to send out emails with date/times of events and it takes my corrected times and converts them back into UTZ! I never work on anything outside of EST. Just let me select that once when I make a base and then have me think about it again.