What is UTC?
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is the primary standard for regulating clocks and time around the world. In Honeycode, all dates and times are in UTC, which may require a simple conversion to set up notifications in your local time zone.
Formula
To convert UTC to a different time zone, we can use the NOW() function to subtract/add the offset to UTC and divide by 24.
=NOW()-offset to UTC/24
Returns the date and time in offset time zone.
Pacific Standard Time (PST) is eight hours behind UTC, so you would use the formula:
=NOW()-8/24
Central European Time (CET) is one hour ahead of UTC, so you would use the formula:
=NOW()+1/24
Example
Let’s say your company has offices in six locations. When you add contacts to your employees list, you’d also like to add their home office and local time.
First, we’ll set up a table of locations that includes the city, time zone, and the offset from UTC, not including daylight savings time. Since we need to account for daylight savings in some cities, we’ll also add a column for that, as well as the final offset from UTC.
To determine whether or not we need to account for daylight savings for a given city, we’ll apply the following formula to the final UTC offset column:
=IF([Daylight Savings?]="YES",[UTC Offset]-1,[UTC Offset])
Next, we’ll set up a table of people that includes each person’s home office, the time zone it’s located in, and the current local time.
The first column we’ll format as contacts. This will automatically insert a dropdown of people on your Honeycode team. The next column we’ll format as a rowlink with a picklist from the locations table.
You can set the display text by adding/deleting columns from the location’s rowlink. In this case, we’ll customize the display to show cities from the office column as well emojis from the icon column.
Builder tip: You can concatenate columns to display, as we have done above with the city name and associated icon.
We’ll repeat the step for the time zone column, formatting the column as a rowlink with a picklist, and customizing the display to show the office column in the locations table.
Finally, to calculate the current local time in each city, we format the column as time, and apply the column formula:
=NOW()-[Office][Final UTC Offset]/24
The formula uses the NOW() function to subtract the final offset time divided by 24 to convert each city’s time in UTC to the current local time.
Time zone offsets
United States
| Time zone | Offset from UTC |
|---|---|
| Atlantic Daylight Time | -3 hours from UTC |
| Atlantic Standard Time | -4 hours from UTC |
| Eastern Daylight Time | -4 hours from UTC |
| Eastern Standard Time | -5 hours from UTC |
| Central Daylight Time | -5 hours from UTC |
| Central Standard Time | -6 hours from UTC |
| Mountain Daylight Time | -6 hours from UTC |
| Mountain Standard Time | -7 hours from UTC |
| Pacific Daylight Time | -7 hours from UTC |
| Pacific Standard Time | -8 hours from UTC |
| Alaska Daylight Time | -8 hours from UTC |
| Alaska Standard Time | -9 hours from UTC |
| Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time | -10 hours from UTC |
| Samoa Standard Time | -11 hours from UTC |
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