How to show the time zone in a report

[scotty81]

Hi,

I would like to show the time zone in a report.   Can this be easily done?

The example I have is a report showing incidents, which includes the field for when the incident is opened.   If the incident occurs 10 AM Eastern Standard Time and I am in that same time zone and run the report, and export in XLS to others, the open time will show 10 AM.   But, if I am in the Pacific Time Zone (3 hours earlier) and run that same report, the time will show the incident occurred at 7 AM.   The result is that we would have 2 report "instances", run by 2 different people, in 2 different time zones, producing reports that show different results.   I realize that the time is always local time to that user, but since the report doesn't say that, it will result in confusion.

What I would really like to do is always show the EST time zone on the report, regardless of whatever actual time zone I am in.   Alternatively, I would like to show the Time Zone (like GMT - 7:00) in a separate column, so at least the consumer of the report will know when the incident occurred relative to some standard.

I would imagine I'm not the first person to need this functionality, but I didn't see anything obvious in the Wiki.   Can others provide guidance?

Regards,

Scotty

[Brad Tilton]

For the first situation, you'd probably have to add another field for Created in EST or something like that and then use a business rule to populate that field with EST time.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's a great way to add the logged in user's time zone to a report. You could easily add the time zone of the caller or assigned to users by dot walking to the time zone record of their user records, but I don't think that helps you too much.

I think whichever way you go there's going to be at least a custom field and script to populate it.

[randrews]

If you are in eureka you can put the time in the header or footer.. this will show the time and time zone the report was run in.

[scotty81]

Hi Doug,

Thanks for your suggestion.   If I export my report to a PDF file, I would imagine I can add the time zone info to a header or footer.   I haven't tried that.   But, if I export to an XLS file, I'm not sure how that would work.   Or, does one specify whatever information one wants in the header and footer of the report and then it will "show up", regardless of whether the output format is XLS, CSV, PDF or other?  

Thanks in advance for any clarification you could provide.

Regards,

Scotty