On 6/4/2013 9:23 PM, Brian Barker wrote:
At 16:41 04/06/2013 -0700, Spencer Graves wrote:
When I copy a date from one LO spreadsheet to another, it changes.
Much as you might be surprised by this, it is, I think, by design.
Specifically, I have *.ods files DateProblem2add.ods and
DateProblemMerge.ods. The first contains only 2013-05-30 in cell
A1. The second contains only 2012-12-9 in cell A1. I copy the first
date into cell A3 of the second file, where it appears 2009-05-29 --
four years and one day before the date I thought I was copying --
which is what I see in that cell in the attached
DateProblemMerge.ods. This is using LO 4.0.3.3 under Windows 7.
Dates and times in a spreadsheet are stored internally as days and
fractions of a day from a selected origin. Displayed values such as
your "2013-05-30" are merely the result of cell formatting. If you go
to Tools | Options... | LibreOffice Calc | Calculate | Date, you will
see that there are three date origins to choose from. If you copy
dates between spreadsheets, the underlying numbers are copied. If the
date origins are different for your two spreadsheets, the copied
values will be interpreted and displayed as different dates.
You will notice that two of the date origin choices are four years and
two days apart. Er, that's indeed four years and one day if you allow
for Microsoft Excel's false belief that 1900 was a leap year.
I trust this helps.
Yes. Thanks much.
I just copied dates from LO Calc to MS Paint. Different dates
with different date origin settings in LO displayed correctly. This
suggests to me that it should be possible to modify the code for paste
in LO Calc so the result is not gabled when the date origins are
different between the target spreadsheet and the one from which the date
was copied.
Thanks again.
Spencer Graves
p.s. I've contributed solutions to date-origin problems crudely like
this to the Free Open-Source Software R, www.r-project.org. However,
I've done so little with this kind of programming to volunteer to fix it
myself.
Brian Barker
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