Bug 115359

Summary: When exporting documents as CSV, dates are munged.
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Luke Ross <luke>
Component: gnumericAssignee: Caolan McNamara <caolanm>
Status: CLOSED RAWHIDE QA Contact:
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Priority: medium    
Version: 1   
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Hardware: i686   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: FC3 Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2004-07-28 18:59:04 UTC Type: ---
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Description Luke Ross 2004-02-11 12:39:17 UTC 
gnumeric-1.2.1-1

When files are exported from gnumeric as CSV, any dates in the sheet
are saved as numbers rather than understandable dates. This is
particularly galling when importing a CSV and then exporting it
produces completely different output. The date format exported does
not appear to be understood by other programs. Reproducible every time.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open gnumeric
2. Enter some dates, eg: A1=1/1/1970,A2=1/1/1900,A3=23/3/1981,A4=2/2/2004
3. Save the sheet using the text output converter, selecting comma as
the seperator.
  
Actual results:
When opened in vi, results are similar to:
25569
1
29668
38019

Expected results:
Exported data to be in some sort of understandable (ideally
configurable) format, eg:
1970-1-1
1900-1-1
1981-3-23
2004-2-2

Really this needs to be configurable to be able to round-trip files as
closely as possible. This behaviour was not seen under Redhat 8
running gnumeric gnumeric-1.0.9-2 (I haven't tested RH9).
Comment 1 Caolan McNamara 2004-05-13 12:34:21 UTC 
Yeah, gnumeric is saving the dates as the number of days since the end
of 1899. The developers of gnumeric are aware of it at
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=128936. 

For what its worth calc in OpenOffice doesn't exhibit this behaviour.
Comment 2 Caolan McNamara 2004-07-28 18:59:04 UTC 
With at least gnumeric 1.2.12 (FC3) choose file->save as->Text export
(configurable) and click through to "Choose export format" and select
"Preserves Formats" and gnumeric will save the date as it appears on
screen