At 03:59 01/01/2015 +0000, Conly Honly Donly wrote:
At last, I knew how my colleagues strongly
believed and what they wanted to achieve. They
wanted a date format which works across all
known free, paid, old and new versions of
spreadsheet program, e.g. LibreOffice Calc. They
decided to use YYYY.MM.DD. and MM.DD., e.g.
2015.01.01. ---> three dots. 1st January, 2015.
and 01.01. ---> two dots. 1st January.
This format is standardized internally for communication. The good things are:
(1) The date is stored as "text" or "string" on
the computer. It is not a "number" to the
computer any more. Adding or subtracting dates
is disabled. It is good for just displaying the
dates, which my colleagues wanted.
Spreadsheets generally used for calculation, so
preventing it would usually be considered a
drawback, not an advantage. You could put text
values into word processor tables instead. But chacun à son goût.
There is virtually a very large range of dates
can be processed, e.g. AD 1000.01.01. to AD
9999.12.31. and BC 1000.01.01. to BC 9999.12.31.
Hold on: "BC 1000.01.01. to BC 9999.12.31." makes
no sense, as your start date is after your end
date! Do you mean BC 9999.12.31. to BC
1000.01.01.? But that starts at the end if the
first year and finishes at the beginning of the
end year, losing all but one day each of those
two years. So perhaps you mean BC 9999.01.01. to
BC 1000.12.31.? That's better, but it still
leaves you with what would be a roughly
twenty-thousand year range - but with a strange
central gap of 1998 years, from 999 BC (BCE) to
AD 999 (CE) inclusive. I can't imagine you mean that.
This YYYY.MM.DD. format is a beautiful workaround ...
Spreadsheets have always been able to handle
text. I suspect most spreadsheet users would not
see selecting text as a data type to be a workaround, beautiful or otherwise.
I can think of two limitations.
People make mistakes. One obvious limitation is
that non-existent dates can be entered as easily
as real ones. Entering "2015.02.29." as text
creates something looking as much like a date as
does "2015.02.28.", whereas entering these
(supposed) dates normally shows one as a
right-aligned date and the other as left-aligned
text. Only Erich Kästner and perhaps the
Tiananmen Square protestors are allowed the 35th of May.
But I say again: chacun à son goût.
Brian Barker
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