On 07/12/06, Ross Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Dotan Cohen wrote:
> I've opened some spreadsheets today that I haven't open in quite a
> while. I see that a lot of my data has been replaced with the date
> 30-12-1899. This is in cells where <something> was before, and I don't
> remember what. This seems to be some sort of data corruption. Is
> anybody familiar with it? Is it recoverable? I'm certain that I have
> backups somewhere, but I'd like to understand the root of this
> condition.
The date 30-12-1899 is one of the epoch dates in OOo represented
internally by a floating point value of 0.0 (zero).
[All dates/times are floating point values internally, where the integer
part is the number of days since the epoch, and the fraction part is the
time given as a fraction of 24 hours. You can also choose different
epoch dates, e.g. this one or 01-01-1900 etc.]
So you just need to work out if 0.0, or 0, is a reasonable value for
these cells, and why they have a date format (if they were originally
something else). E.g. Do they contain formulae? If so, do they reference
blank cells or text cells (possibly even text cells that look like
dates), because these cells will probably have a value of 0 (zero)?
Ross
Thanks, Ross. No, 0 (integer or float) is not a logical value for
these fields. It should have been a non-null string, most likely an
email address for many of the fields.
OOo has always annoyed me with it's automatic formating, to the point
where I was using Kspread for quite some time. Might Kspread have
corrupted these documents? Or OOo? I'm not sure which program was last
used to update the contents. Note that the date (current problem)
appears in both programs.
Dotan Cohen
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