Show last refresh date in local time on powerbi.com

Learn how to show “latest refreshed on” on a published report in Power BI


The challenge

To show latest refreshed on date in Power BI you might have found a good solution that works perfect on your desktop.

But when the report is published to www.powerbi.com the time is suddenly off by several hours.

The reason is that powerbi.com is calculating the local time using UTC.

The solution

We want to create a new custom query that works on www.powerbi.com and returns the latest refresh date converted to our local date/time (which should also work for summer/winter time)

Step 1
Click on transform data

Step 2
Click on New Source and select Blank Query

Insert below code in Advanced Editor

let
    WinterOffset = 1,
    SummerOffset = 2,

    LocalTime = DateTime.LocalNow(),
    Year = Date.Year(LocalTime),
    CurrentDate = Date.From(LocalTime),

    LastDayMarch = #date(Year, 3, Date.DaysInMonth(#date(Year,3,1))),
    LastSundayMarch = Date.AddDays(LastDayMarch, -Date.DayOfWeek(LastDayMarch, Day.Sunday)),

    LastDayOctober = #date(Year, 10, Date.DaysInMonth(#date(Year,10,1))),
    LastSundayOctober = Date.AddDays(LastDayOctober, -Date.DayOfWeek(LastDayOctober, Day.Sunday)),

    IsSummerTime = CurrentDate >= LastSundayMarch and CurrentDate < LastSundayOctober,

    Offset = if IsSummerTime then #duration(0, SummerOffset, 0, 0) else #duration(0, WinterOffset, 0, 0),

    Adjusted = LocalTime + Offset,
    Formatted = DateTime.ToText(Adjusted, "dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss"),

    Output = #table({"LastRefresh"}, {{Formatted}})
in
    Output

The WinterOffset and SummerOffSet can be adjusted according to your timezone

Step 3
In Power Query click Close and Apply

Insert the LastRefresh column into your report. You will notice that the time is off, but this will be OK, since the time will only be “wrong” for the desktop version of the report.

Step 4 Upload your report to www.powerbi.com and refresh your symantic model

The refreshed time will now be your local timezone


See also