Re: Copy & Paste in Calc changes date - nasty
On (13/11/04 14:28), Jim Watson wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 05:08:09PM +0000, Clive Menzies wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > I've encountered a curious problem which has serious repercussions.
> >
> > Briefly it involves copying transaction data from one sheet to another.
> >
> > When I copy all the data (including the date column) from one sheet to
> > another, 4 years and a day are added to every date in the column.
> >
> > Should I file a bug? I am happy to send the sheets in question to an
> > individual but not the list.
>
> Clive,
>
> Date values are stored as a number such that =value(now()) will
> reveal.
>
> I had a look at your workbooks. There is a setting in menu- tools- options-
> spreadsheet -calculate which allows the user to choose the date to be
> applied to day zero. Your two workbooks have different selections for this
> option. One starts time at 30 december 1899 while the other starts time at 1
> january 1904.
>
> So when a copy and paste is done between the two workbooks, the date values
> (numbers) are transferred exactly but the selection for day zero is not
> transferred. Hence the same date values report different dates in the two
> workbooks.
>
> I think the conclusion is this is a feature, but I agree it is dangerous. My
> suggestion is to file an enhancement request upstream.
>
> http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_issues.htm
Hi Jim
Many thanks for this. Sorry it's taken so long to respond but I've been
bogged down with a complex spreadsheet exercise.
It is quite a feature and I can see how it could be useful. However, I
exchange spreadsheets with windows users and I suspect that the problem
arises because Excel uses a different base date. Some of my
spreadsheets were originally created on MS Office running on OSX.
I'm in two minds as to whether it is better to have dates standardised
on the same base as Excel or whether this "feature" needs to be
prominently highlighted in some way.
I haven't had time to do any reasearch into whether my assumption about
base dates is correct. Maybe other openoffice users have a view on
this?
Regards
Clive
--
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