Datetime

Function Friday - DateTime in Power Automate

In this YouTube video, I show you some of the quirks of working with DateTime values in Power Automate.

Friday, February 7, 2025 | 1 minute Read

Function Friday - Date and Time Wrap Up: Timezones and Ticks

This time I’m walking through the remaining Date and Time functions. These include the functions that convert between and work with timezones: convertFromUtc, convertToUtc, convertTimeZone, utcNow. But first, we’re going to take a look at ticks. Ticks Just what the heck are ticks, anyway? Ticks are an integer value that represents the total number of 100-nanosecond intervals that have elapsed since January 1, 0001 at 12 am midnight, Universal time. These numbers can obviously get quite big. For example, the ticks value of September 9, 2022, at 10:00 AM UTC time is 637983144000000000.

Friday, September 9, 2022 | 4 minutes Read

Function Friday - More Date and Time Fun: startOf and dayOf

Previously I’ve walked through how to do some date math, formatting, and parsing. Now I’ll drill into a few of the other date and time functions around getting certain values related to a particular date and time. dayOf Functions There are three functions that are closely related: dayOfMonth, dayOfWeek, dayOfYear. All three function in the same manner. They return a numerical value that represents the particular DateTime’s value in reference to the current month, week, or year.

Friday, September 2, 2022 | 2 minutes Read

Function Friday - Formatting and Parsing Dates and Times

This week I’m looking at formatting and parsing date and time values in Power Automate. This can be a great pain when working with data in your functions for a straightforward reason: DateTime values come in many different formats. And different systems will require different formats for your DateTime values. And that’s before you even consider the pain of timezones. formatDateTime We’ll first look at formatting. The formatDateTime function takes a DateTime string and converts it into a different format. The pattern is as follows:

Friday, August 19, 2022 | 4 minutes Read

Function Friday: Date and Time Addition

This time I’m going to start delving into the date and time functions of Power Automate. Date and time is one of the most painful parts of working with flows. The reason for that is that sometimes a DateTime value is a DateTime, sometimes it’s a number, and sometimes it’s a string. Usually it’s a string… mostly. And it’s hard to know which it is at any given moment. Then add to that plethora of different formats that a DateTime value might take to and from all the various external systems and you have another layer of complexity. And for yet one more level of complexity, we’ll add in the issue of timezones.

Friday, August 12, 2022 | 3 minutes Read