Default value date and time not displaying in my SharePoint lists

Question

None of my SharePoint lists are pulling in the current date and time when i set the default value as "todays date" The section is blank. Almost as if the SharePoint site is unable to locate the date a rime from anywhere. I have tried the regional settings in the SharePoint site but that has made no difference. I have set it to a different region and then set it back to London etc

It also doesn't work if I use the calculated value and use =NOW() - Same issue just a blank box. it was working for a week prior to this bug displaying.

I think that SharePoint is not locating the current time from our region some of the users are reporting that they are 2 hours ahead of the time Zone when looking at their contact card on team.

this site is not allowing me to set up a screenshot sorry.

Answer 1

I've had this not entirely be the case on our site. initially users would rarely fill this field in, but it would be visible.

After the initial day the issue started showing up users noticed the field would (sometimes) be empty in the newly created item, which due to our sorting on this field makes them 'disappear' from the default view. This is how I initially spotted the issue.

Unless hiding the column makes this always work again, I don't see this as a stable workaround.

As another workaround if you always wanted current date, you could also use the Created column instead, but you can't edit that one.

I fully agree here that neither of these are a real fix for the issue.

For the time being I've once again made a report of it this time linking to this thread directly, hopefully now it's not silently marked as No issue found again.

Answer 2

While I am glad this worked for you. I tried this a week ago after seeing this as a result to this problem a couple years ago. I just tried again and it still does not work. We are located in Eastern Time Zone. Verifying Eastern does nothing, changing it to Central and then back to Eastern also does nothing. Problem still exists. Again, glad it helped you and others. But I believe the core issue to the problem is not resolved.

Answer 3

Agreed, it's intermittent for me at the moment as well, while it does work for 'most', it used to just work for all regardless of specific settings.

Despite this all my attempts to file this as a ticket on the Microsoft service page they still mark it as 'No issue found'. Seems it's something that has been changed elsewhere and they won't roll back.

Answer 4

I might have found a fix, although this does mean the behavior changed at some point.

Setting the Region>Locale setting to the exact same one as the effected user's machine restores the original desired behavior, both solves the incorrect date selected in calendar ui and sets a default value again.

In theory the browser should know which locale is set on the machine, so I fail to see why this is a hard failure when there's a mismatch in site settings and locally. Non the less, worth a try if not already checked and it works out in my usecase as we force the locale through AD anyway to be the same everywhere.

Answer 5

Thank you Nils! Although we already had those time zone settings set correctly under those Regional Settings, going in and re-clicking on them and doing the 'OK' at the bottom does seem to have fixed things, some kind of magic? All I know is that now the day's date/time combo is back to being right on the minute, yes!