GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 135946
the 'M-98' date format from XL is not properly imported
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
If you use the 'M-98' date format in XL, i.e.: 01/09/2000 appears as s-00 and open the same .xls file in gnumeric, the cell appears with the mmmmm-yy date format, i.e.: septembre-00 I know this XL format is not very good (because for example we cannot distinguish between July and June), and thus it should perhaps not be implemented in gnumeric. But at least, we should import it as m-yy, i.e.: 9-00 to keep the same number of characters.
Can you supply a sample workbook ? M-yy I can understand, M-98 makes no sense. It's possible this is one of the locale specific formats. I would be able to solve it but we'll need samples from every locale which will be difficult to obtain.
OK, it was in fact the m-yy format from XL. But excel takes the example of the "13/09/1998" date to name its format. Hence M-98, M for March and 98 for 1998. There are two problems here: -this format does not exactly exist in gnumeric. The m-yy format in gnumeric uses a number for the month, and not the first letter. For example march 1998 appears as m-98 in EXCEL and 3-98 in gnumeric -this format is imported as mmmmm-yy in gnumeric, which has 4 more characters than the XL format. As a consequence, the date does not always appear if the column width is not sufficient. I will post an example worksheet.
Created attachment 25083 [details] An example worksheet with the m-yy format
The format is actually mmmmm-yy, don't get confused by the default sample value. If you go to Custom after selecting that format you can see the actual format string. The patch is trivial. We did not support mmmmm it appears to be a new addition.