[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 121851] New: Calc loses time zone information for datetime cells

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121851

            Bug ID: 121851
           Summary: Calc loses time zone information for datetime cells
           Product: LibreOffice
           Version: 6.2.0.0.beta1+
          Hardware: All
                OS: All
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: medium
         Component: Calc
          Assignee: libreoffice-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
          Reporter: ddascalescu+freedesktop at gmail.com

Created attachment 147207
  --> https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/attachment.cgi?id=147207&action=edit
Whatever time zone you're in, you'll see the same time, 23:30 on Nov 30

In today's age with geographically distributed teams, and people traveling
frequently, time zone information is critical when sharing spreadsheets. If
accuracy is important, then if a person in San Francisco has an invoice like

"Order received", "2018-11-30 23:00:00"
"Job completed", "2018-12-01 10:00:00"

and sends it to someone in Berlin, the person in Berlin should see

"Order received", "2018-12-01 08:00:00"
"Job completed", "2018-12-01 19:00:00"

This is not what happens. The person in Berlin will see the same local times as
the person in San Francisco, which is confusing (I don't send orders at 11pm),
and simply incorrect. Moreover, dates may be off, as in the example above, and
for monthly billing processes, this can push items from one month to the next
to one party, while to the other they're in the same month.

1. Is this really acceptable for Calc? Do we assume users no longer send
spreadhseets, but use Google Sheets or equivalent online systems?
2. What about people who travel? If I have a sheet in which I log
time-sensitive incidents, or if such a sheet is generated by another system,
and I look at it from a different timezone, the timestamp information will be
incorrect.

I know Excel doesn't have the concept of universal time, but that was 20 years
ago. Should we try to improve the situation in LibreCalc?

To test, I've opened the attached file with LibreCalc 6.2dev on Ubuntu 16,
after changing time zones and restarting Calc. The time shown was always the
same, 2018-11-30 23:30:00.

The way I generated the file was with this Node.js code:

```js
const XLSX = require('xlsx');

const wb = XLSX.utils.book_new();

const ws = XLSX.utils.json_to_sheet([]);

XLSX.utils.book_append_sheet(wb, ws, 'Bug sheet');

// Dec 1, 00:30 in Berlin
// Nov 30, 23:30 in London
// Nov 30, 17:30 in New York
// Nov 13, 14:30 in San Francisco
ws.A1 = { t: 'd', v: new Date('2018-11-30T23:30:00Z') };

XLSX.writeFile(wb, 'date.ods');
```

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