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MichaelC
MichaelC
Contributor ⭐️
May 7, 2018

Export, date range mismatch

  • May 7, 2018
  • 3 replies
  • 155 views
Hey everyone,

So I've stumbled across a little reporting roadblock.

In Export, I want to select some month by month reports for comparison.

However, only the Last Month selection copies the month timeframe exactly.

If I use Custom Range to select the month before, I get a weird time selection, probably based on my timezone settings.

See the image.



Manually choosing the last month also selects 'Last Month' so there is no joy in matching up report times by doing that.

3 replies

Shane1
Shane1
Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
May 7, 2018
Hey Michael,

We do have a disclaimer in there which says "Note: All dates and times will be shown in UTC timezone. This includes date range selection and dates in the CSV". So this should be the same across the board, with whichever export and selection you make. So you should be shown the correct data but the timestamps might appear weird to you because of this.

And to me it seems the data is correct when you select the exact dates, when you select 'last month', there is a small bug as it is showing some posts from outside the time range, so if you select 1 - 30 April, its showing a few posts from May 1st. So for your reporting for now I would just use the exact dates selector.

And if you manually select last months dates, it might appear it will be the exact same as the 'last month' export but its not actually. Because of your time zone the export saves for me as 31st March - 30th April, as we are a couple of hours ahead, the first couple of lines are from the night of 31st March.
MichaelC
MichaelCAuthor
Contributor ⭐️
May 8, 2018
Hey Shane,

That's not what happened here though.

Regardless of the date and time in the display on the Export page, all the dates and times in the exported CSVs start and end at midnight.

The 'Last Month' selection does reflect that properly in the time/date range, but 'Custom Range' exports do not, as can be seen in my previous image.

So, that makes it a display bug? Not a functionality bug.
Shane1
Shane1
Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
May 8, 2018
Hi Michael,

Ah yes, you're in a different timezone to me so we won't see the exact same results.

But all data shown in exports is showing timestamps from UTC.

In Amsterdam we're in the timezone UTC+2 now, so if I run your export for the month of April using a custom date range, it shows data from the 31st March at 10pm - 30th April at 10pm which is correct, and how it should be.

So if you're in Australia and getting exports which are from midnight to midnight then thats incorrect as you're not in UTC. Only users in that timezone should have exports from midnight to midnight. Your browser determines your timezone, so seems like something is going wrong there.

Does that make sense? Its a bit of a confusing thing to explain 😄
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