Dates should be displayed in the local time zone when exported from VI into Excel

[andrew_cosmatos]

When dates are viewed in the VI GUI they are automatically displayed in the user's local time zone BUT when you export to Excel they are in UTC? This is confusing our users as quite rightly they expect to see the same data in both formats, this should be a bug fix and not a feature request IMHO...

[Patrick]

@andrew_cosmatos If you believe it's a bug then I suggest you raise this issue directly with SAS Tech Support. 

[andrew_cosmatos]

Hi Patrick,

I sure did and they sent me here 🙁

[Patrick]

Guess that felt a bit disappointing. Voted for your feature request.

I assume the challenge is that SAS on the server side uses UTC. It's the browser setting that then surfaces the UTC value in the local time zone. 

Afaik Excel doesn't provide such a capability. It just shows the formatted UTC value and one would need to actually change the internal value to show it in the local time zone - but that's actually then "the wrong date/time value" and things will fall apart when the Excel is shared with someone in another time zone. For this person in the other time zone the browser would surface the UTC datetime using their local browser setting - but the Excel would still contain and surface the datetime for the timezone where it has been created. 

[andrew_cosmatos]

Yep pretty frustrating, thx for the vote Patrick 👍