Dotan Cohen wrote:
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.
Except that cells which contain strings (or should that be any
non-numerical value?) have a value of zero in a numerical context.
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.
Just tried saving/loading between OOo (2.0.4), Kspread (1.6.1) and back
again, using only ODF format, to see if anything stuck out. There was
some minor difference in the way email address cells are formatted
(extra row height), and the content is altered with the addition of
unnecessary whitespace to the start and end of the string in Kspread,
but only if OOo has converted them to hyperlinks already. So translation
between the two apps isn't perfect, which makes it a possibility that
something could have happened there, particularly in older less mature
versions of either application.
That the date problem appears in both apps could suggest that the
problem occurred on the first translation to Kspread, but then you only
noticed the problem when you went back to OOo. If you've just noticed
the problem in Kspread after seeing it in OOo by re-opening it again in
Kspread - that could suggest the problem arose in translation to OOo. I
don't suppose you have other copies of the original good version of the
document?
Ross
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