Hi All,
A client of mine approached me today with their latest head-scratcher. In a PowerBI solution of theirs, they wanted the Date format to appear as "Day of Week DD Month YYYY", or "Sunday 3 October 2021" etc. In their model, they have a date field and the display format of the field was set to *Wednesday 14 March 2001 (Long Date)
They deployed their solution and all was good until some users started reporting that they were seeing dates in DD MMM YYYY format. (See image below)
It turns out that their local browser language setting was changing the display format of the date field. Depending on what locale you were in, you see a different format for "Long Date". Any of the users who were seeing the short format had their browser language settings set to English UK. In Chrome, to see your settings to select ... -> Settings -> Advanced -> Languages. In this case, you would see something like;
To resolve this, without having to change browser settings, the solution is back in the original format options in PowerBI. By selecting the format Wednesday 14 March 2001 (dddd d mmmm yyyy), the date field was now formatted the way they wanted on every browser.
It turns out that the * is important to note here. The format of the date is determined by the regional settings of the computer for date display. Clearly, the browser also plays a role here as well. By select the explicit form of the date, you avoid this issue in different browsers.
I hope this helps someone!
Cheers
Mark