Google Time Zone Converter

Add a second time zone to Google Calendar

On the desktop web app, open the gear icon in the top right and choose Settings, then Time zone in the left sidebar. Tick "Show secondary time zone" and pick a city from the dropdown. A second clock appears beside the main one in the top-right corner, updated live, and it follows daylight saving for that city automatically.

For a one-off event you can also override the zone: open the event, click the time field, and choose "More time zones" to see the same time rendered in several cities before you commit. Individual events can carry their own time zone, which matters when you invite someone whose calendar lives in another region — Google shows the event in their local time automatically.

The limitation is that the secondary clock shows one extra city at a time and does not tell you whether a proposed time works for a third or fourth person. For a genuinely multi-party meeting you need a comparison view.

Build a time zone converter in Google Sheets

Sheets has no native "convert time zone" function, because it stores a time as a number of hours since midnight with no time zone attached. The standard workaround is to keep a lookup table of offsets and do the arithmetic yourself.

Create a column of city names, a column of their current UTC offsets (in decimal hours, so 5.5 for India and 5.75 for Nepal), and a column of the UTC time you want to convert. Then compute the local time with a formula such as =MOD(B2 + $D2, 24) and format the result as time. The catch is that the offset column is only correct for one date — once daylight saving changes, every row is wrong.

That is exactly the problem this site solves: read the current offset for each city from the live IANA database, paste it into the sheet, and refresh it on the two dates a year when the rules change. For anything long-lived, drive the offsets from an API instead of a static sheet.

• Store the base time as a UTC value, never as local time
• Keep offsets in decimal hours so half- and quarter-hour zones work
• Wrap with MOD(…, 24) so the result rolls past midnight correctly
• Label the offset column with the date it was captured
• Re-check every offset after each daylight saving transition

Using Google Search as a quick world clock

Searching "time in Tokyo" or "current time in Berlin" returns a card with the local time, and Google's generic "world time" search shows a list of major cities with their current times. It is fast, and it is fine for a single glance at one city.

It is not a converter. You cannot ask it for the difference between two cities, it does not show a day-by-day schedule, it will not tell you who is currently at work, and it does not handle a meeting spanning more than two cities. It is a lookup, not a planner.

Why Calendar alone is not a time zone converter

Google Calendar stores one absolute instant per event, which is exactly right for recording a meeting — and exactly wrong for choosing one. The moment you need to compare a proposed time across several regions, you need the local wall-clock time in each of them, and you need to know whether the slot lands inside working hours for the people involved.

That comparison is what a time zone converter adds: the shared timeline, the business-hours shading, the overlap detection and the ranked suggestions. Once a slot is chosen, Google Calendar is the right place to put it — and the export links on this site open a pre-filled Google Calendar event with the UTC instants already correct, so nothing is left to interpret.