GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 412433
Saving a document with dates does not respect locale date format
Last modified: 2007-02-27 09:08:19 UTC
Please describe the problem: If you import a tab delimited spreadsheet into gnumeric, and resave it, and you are in the US locale, it will convert all your date/time fields to european format. EG: 4/6/2006 -> 2006/04/06 This doesn't make sense for a few reasons. First, I'm in the US locale, so it shouldn't do this. Second, in gnumeric window onscreen it properly shows you the 4/6/2006 format, so you would have no idea saving it would 'convert' these fields. Third, even if you highlight the column and change the format of the column to m/d/yyyy, it will still export it in yyyy/m/d format. Unfortunately this makes gnumeric quite useless for me. I can't come up with any workaround for this. If I try to make gnumeric just treat those columns as text, it'll convert 04/06/2006 to 38813... Which is presumably the number of days since 1970. Gnumeric should use the date format in the originally imported file, or respect what format it displays on screen. Note: the original reporter indicated the bug was in package 'gnumeric'; however, that package was not published in Baltix. Steps to reproduce: 1. import tab delimited spreadsheet 2. save it 3. reopen Actual results: Expected results: Does this happen every time? Other information:
To have more control over your formatting just use the configurable formatter.
The format, apart from using slashes instead of dashes, is the ISO format. It is *not* a European format -- that would be d/m/yyyy or something like it, depending on where in Europe. More importantly, the format used is just about the only format that will be understood world-wide. I think creating files that will not be misinterpreted is very important. If you want the on-screen version -- which obviously can discard information that the current format does not display -- then use the configurable formatter, i.e., select "Save-As" with file type "Text export (configurable)" and select format "Preserve".
Thank you. This issue was reported on behalf of an Ubuntu user in launchpad, I will let them know your comments. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnumeric/+bug/40349