Which date format styles should we use if we are building a report that is being consumed internationally?
Remember, 01/12/2021 is December 1st or January 12th depending in which part of the world it is being read.
The decision may be taken from our hands if there is a company policy in place. If the company is based in the USA, for example, they may choose to use US formatted date fields as a standard for reporting across the entire business, however, if the field needs to be truly dynamic depending on the consumers location, the answer lies in this tool tip:
There are 2 formats in the selection that are prefixed with an asterisk:
There are 2 variables that the Power BI Service checks when loading reports in the service.
First it will check the language setting of the user account in the service. This is set under ‘Settings >> General >> Language’. There is a dropdown option that acts as both a language and regional setting, this drives how dates are formatted when dynamic date formats are used.
If this is set to ‘Default (browser language)’ the second variable, the browser’s default language setting, will take effect.
In Edge this is set under ‘Settings >> Language’, when multiple languages are set, the topmost one is considered the default.
In Chrome it is set under ‘Settings >> Advanced >> Language’, this uses the same system as Edge where the topmost language is used as default.
Here is an example of a table loaded in a browser using both English UK and English US:
This example shows that not only does the format of the date itself change (day and month have switched) but there are also visual connotations to account for. The US format uses a 12-hour clock by default and the addition of the AM/PM suffix changes the column width and drastically alters the readability of the table and potentially the entire report. It is these occurrences we need to be aware of when developing reports for international consumption.
This issue can easily be avoided by using the ‘Auto-size column width’ setting under ‘Column Headers’ on the formatting tab of the visual, or by allowing for the growth when setting manual column widths. (For a great guide on manually setting equal column widths, please read this helpful post by my colleague, Nick Edwards)
Unfortunately, this post comes with a caveat, at the time of writing it would seem there is a bug in Power BI. Remember this from earlier?
As you can see below, both fields use the UK format of DD/MM/YYYY when the browser language is set to English UK.
However, when the browser settings are changed to English US, only the *‘General Date’ format has changed, the *’DD/MM/YYYY’ format is still showing in the UK format even though there is an asterisk next to it in the selection list.
Hopefully once this issue is addressed, the use of regionally dynamic date formats will be available for both long and short formats.
