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Wrong date and time on Power Automate Flow

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Posted on by esilva83

Hello,

I hope someone can help me with something that maybe is really easy, but I'm a newbie at Power Automate. I have a flow that get a list of items from sharepoint and send an email with that items in an HTML table. The problem is, that 2 of these items are dates, and when the email arrives the dates are wrong.

So, as you can see, in the email each item is adding 6 hours to the original dates in sharepoint. I've read that this is because sharepoint uses UTC, and I should convert the time zone to fit with mine (UTC-06:00), however, I don't know how or where to do that inside my flow without affecting the final result. This is how my flow looks like:

Any help would be really appreciated, and please, if you could explain like you would explain to a 12 years old, it would be great.

Regards.

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Business Process Flows

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Ellis Karim 11,478 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Wrong date and time on Power Automate Flow

Hi @esilva83,

The date's aren't wrong.

(1) SharePoint always stores all dates in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) time-zone.

(2) When you enter a date and time into a SharePoint date/time column, SharePoint converts it to UTC before storing it.

(3) A ‘Z’ suffix at the end of a date time string indicates UTC (Coordinated Universal Time):

2024-10-05T08:15Z

(4) SharePoint always stores all dates in UTC regardless of your local time-zone or the SharePoint site’s local time zone settings.

(3) When you VIEW dates in SharePoint, they are displayed according to the site’s Regional settings. For example if your SharePoint site’s Regional Settings are (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US and Canada), dates will be displayed in Pacific Time. So a date of 05/10/2024 01:15 Pacific Time (US and Canada) gets stored as 2024-10-05T08:15Z

(4) Power Automate: Dates are read in UTC. To use dates in a local time context, you need to explicitly convert them to the desired time zone.

If you need to display or use this date in a specific local context, you must convert the UTC value to your desired time zone. This ensures that users see the date and time correctly, based on their local settings.

Here is a Date and Time function you can use:

Function Task

convertFromUtc Convert a timestamp from Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) to the target time zone.

convertFromUtc('2024-12-06T18:00Z', 'Pacific Standard Time', 'dd/MM/yyyy h:mm tt') 06/12/2024 10:00 AM

For Time Zones, see Default Time Zones | Microsoft Learn
Please read the following:

Why Are My SharePoint Dates Wrong in Power Apps and Power Automate? – Ellis Karim's Blog

Avoiding Time Zone Pitfalls: Using OData Date Filters in Power Automate’s Get Item(s) Action for SharePoint – Ellis Karim's Blog

Ellis

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Pstork1 68,326 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Wrong date and time on Power Automate Flow

One thing to add to @EKarim s explanation. In your case you should use the ConvertFromUtc() function in the Data Select action in your flow. Then you'll have the dates and times in the format you want them to be to create the HTML table.

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Paul Papanek Stork, MVP
Blog: https://www.dontpapanic.com/blog

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esilva83 19 on at

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Wrong date and time on Power Automate Flow

@Pstork1 @EKarim Thanks both of you for your kind replies.

Now my flow is working as expected.

Best regards.

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