Tables & field types — Dates that carry a time

A Date field holds a date on its own by default. Tick Include a time on the field and its cells hold a time of day too, with the editors and pickers following automatically. Sorting, filtering, grouping and relative windows like in the next 7 days keep working exactly as they did. Turning the setting back off leaves every stored time alone, and still visible. A configuration box must never quietly rewrite your records, and hiding the times would be indistinguishable on screen from having wiped the column. Underneath it sits the setting that actually needs a decision: Show in each viewer's time zone. • Off (the default) — the time belongs to a place. A shift, an on-site appointment, a delivery slot: 9:00 AM at the site, whoever is looking. Converting it would be wrong, and with a draggable calendar it would be destructive. • On — the time belongs to the people in it. A call, a remote session, a cross-border booking: two people in two places need the same moment shown in their own terms. Nothing in the data can tell those two apart, which is why the field has to be told. Storage never changes either way.