The Convert time zone action is an extremely handy tool within Flow that allows us to change the Time Zone into a time zone and date format of our choosing. Let’s describe how it works…

As shown below, this action allows users to choose time zones for Source and Destination systems, as well as to choose a Format string for the output from a list of several choices.

While the Format string list of options is robust and extremely useful, users may come across a scenario in which they need to have the date formatted in a specific way that is not offered. For example, what if we needed to have the date returned in MONTH DATE, YEAR format (e.g., September 29, 2019)? That is not one of the predefined Format string options, so what do we do in this case? As you might expect, this is where the Enter custom value option comes into play.

One thing that is not very clear when using a custom value in the Format string is what values are accepted. But we did some digging and discovered something interesting: did you know that Flow uses the same Custom Date and Time Format Strings as .net? It’s true… take a look at the link below. All of those same options are available to us in Flow!

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/base-types/custom-date-and-time-format-strings

After consulting the .net resource mentioned above, we discovered that we needed to use to get the output we were looking for. Using that format string, Flow gives us September 29, 2019 - exactly what we wanted!

We hope you found this helpful. Happy Flowing!