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<base href="https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/">
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<th>Bug ID</th>
<td><a class="bz_bug_link
bz_status_UNCONFIRMED "
title="UNCONFIRMED - Status of time zone data storage in date cells; timezone conversion"
href="https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121781">121781</a>
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<th>Summary</th>
<td>Status of time zone data storage in date cells; timezone conversion
</td>
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<th>Product</th>
<td>LibreOffice
</td>
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<th>Version</th>
<td>6.2.0.0.beta1+
</td>
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<th>Hardware</th>
<td>All
</td>
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<th>OS</th>
<td>All
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<th>Status</th>
<td>UNCONFIRMED
</td>
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<th>Severity</th>
<td>normal
</td>
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<th>Priority</th>
<td>medium
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<th>Component</th>
<td>Calc
</td>
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<th>Assignee</th>
<td>libreoffice-bugs@lists.freedesktop.org
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<th>Reporter</th>
<td>ddascalescu+freedesktop@gmail.com
</td>
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<pre>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
<a href="https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Date_and_Time_Functions">https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Date_and_Time_Functions</a> ?
We can then point the author of the library to the appropriate documentation,
to hopefully add support for universal time for ODS files.
[1]: <a href="https://docs.sheetjs.com/#dates">https://docs.sheetjs.com/#dates</a></pre>
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