Daylight Savings Time

On April 2, 2006, most Indiana counties will begin to observe Daylight Saving Time (DST). This change affects Montgomery County and Crawfordsville, and means that Wabash will be on the same time as New York all year. This change has some impact on computer systems, which store the local time zone as part of their system configuration.

Computers at Wabash are set to the "Indiana" time zone (or eastern time without DST). You will need to change the time zone in order for your computer to continue to keep time correctly. See below for help with changing this setting.

Beyond changing the time zone, some programs will require manual adjustment as part of this change. Outlook and Entourage, for example, store the time zone as part of the meeting/appointment times, and so when your computer time zone is switched to Eastern time, appointments originally created in the Indiana time zone will be one hour off.  See below for help with fixing this problem.

Issues with Calendar Programs -- Outlook, Entourage, Palm, Netscape Calendar
Many calendaring and scheduling programs, including Outlook, Entourage, Palm, and Netscape Calendar are likely to exhibit some problems with this change.  If you use these programs, we strongly recommend that you print your entire calendar BEFORE making any changes to your computer time zone.  The issue is that these programs often store the time zone of the meeting or appointment and automatically adjust the time if you move from time zone to time zone, or if people in different time zones are all part of the same meeting.  After April 2, the real time will be an hour different from the originally scheduled time, and your meeting times will be an hour off.

For most systems, problems will be limited to meetings after April 2 that were scheduled before you change your computer time zone to Eastern time.  Unfortunately in our testing the exact problem differs some based on the computer platform, operating system, and software version, so we can't say with certainty what problems you will encounter -- with one version of Palm software, for example, repeating events are off, but others are fine.  This is why the printed backup copy is so important.

Fixing Calendar Problems
After you have printed your calendar and changed your computer's time zone, you can begin to correct calendar entries. You will need to change each entry manually. If you need help with this, please consult your calendar software manual or help system, or contact the Help Desk.

Changing Your Computer's Time Zone Setting
You must change your computer's time zone from Indiana to Eastern so that your computer will keep the correct time when daylight savings time goes into effect. You can make this change at any time, and we recommend you make the change as soon as possible (before the change occurs on April 2). 

Instructions for Windows computers
Instructions for Macintosh computers