[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 121781] New: Status of time zone data storage in date cells; timezone conversion

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121781

            Bug ID: 121781
           Summary: Status of time zone data storage in date cells;
                    timezone conversion
           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

I've just learned that "Excel has no native concept of universal time. All
times are specified in the local time zone. Excel limitations prevent
specifying true absolute dates." [1]

This is quite surprising to me. When people shared Excel files via email or
FTP, how did geographically distributed teams agree on what a given timestamp
meant? If Excel stores only local times, then when a team member from Germany
sends a file to a colleague in Tokyo or in the US, dates could be off by one
day, times will be off by many hours etc.

I'm trying to use a library (SheetJS, link below) that generates XLS or ODS
files, and the author claims it's impossible to store datetimes in UTC in Excel
files: "Following Excel, this library treats all dates as relative to local
time zone".

Does LibreCalc improve on this situation?

Either way, can the timezone aspect please be documented somewhere, e.g. at
https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Date_and_Time_Functions ?

We can then point the author of the library to the appropriate documentation,
to hopefully add support for universal time for ODS files.

[1]: https://docs.sheetjs.com/#dates

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