Re: [libreoffice-users] Date problem in LO Calc 4.0.3.3

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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