Microsoft Lists is available for a lot of people already, and should be globally available by the end of October 2020. Users can start using it as soon as it’s released for your tenant, which is great; but you might get caught out by the same date and time regional problem I did.

Creating a List is easy (right now I have the option available in Teams, but the app in Office 365 hasn’t turned up yet), and there’s many use cases for wanting a date or time field.

However, the suggestion on what day it is was wrong:

Today is actually Wednesday, October 14th 2020. It’s being caused because the timezone is wrong for the list. How do we fix that?

A Microsoft List can be created two ways – in the single user context, or in a Microsoft 365 Group context. If you’re doing in in Teams then the later only applies. Individually, it’s saved in the same area as your OneDrive for Business (which is backeneded by SharePoint), but for a Group it’s saved straight into the Site for the Group.

Lists in OneDrive for Business

For the individual point of view, there’s already a Microsoft Answer on how to fix this – change your Time Zone and Region Locale. The link for this is indivualised for your tenant and account, but you can access it by:

• Browse to office.com and sign in
• Click the OneDrive app from the left hand menu
• Click the cog in the top right corner and choose ‘OneDrive Settings’
• Click ‘More Settings’ in the left hand list
• Under ‘Region and Language’ choose ‘Regional Settings’
• Choose the correct Time Zone and Locale for your account

Changing this for all users is a bit more of a problem. There’s a PowerShell script here to update all existing ones, and new users there appears to be no way to do it based on this outstanding UserVoice – if you find anything different, please share and I’ll update this post.

Lists in SharePoint Online

A Microsoft List tied to a Microsoft 365 Group will read the Time Zone and Region settings from the Group’s site, which is accessed a bit differently:

1. Browse to office.com and sign in
2. If you have the Lists app in the left hand menu, choose that and skip to step 5
3. If there is no Lists app, click the SharePoint app from the left hand menu
4. Choose the Microsoft 365 Group that contains the Microsoft List (if you’re unsure, you can try finding the List in Teams, clicking the elipsis and choosing ‘Open in SharePoint’.
5. Click the cog in the top right corner and choose ‘Site Contents’ then choose ‘Site Settings’
6. Click ‘Regional Settings’ under ‘Site Administration’
7. Choose the correct Time Zone and Locale for your Group and press ‘OK’ in the bottom right corner.

This works for a single site, but what about a company wide default?

In the SharePoint admin center, under Settings then Site creation, you can set the default time zone for new sites. This won’t help any existing Microsoft 365 Group already created (as a site is created at the time the group gets created), but will help with future sites.

If you want to update existing sites in PowerShell, you’ll need to start with this command:

Set-SPoSitesRegionalSettings -Url site.url.goes.here -TimeZoneID 19

That will change just the specified site.

The list of TimeZoneIDs is available from Microsoft here and there’s also a Gallery Script called Update the time zones in all sites in SharePoint Online which you could use to update all sites if you can’t work out how to do it.

A lot of details there just to change the date detection in Lists, but hopefully this gives you enough information to understand the scenarios and how to resolve them.