At 14:59 30/05/2007 -0600, William G. Bates wrote:
I am a genealogist and have great need of a spreadsheet that will
properly display dates before 1900. With the continuing plethora of
date related data being prepared for internet display I can see
where the need exists for USGENWEB county controllers to also have
access to a spreadsheet that will accurately display dates backward to the
beginning of the Gregorian calendar and possibly even
beyond. However, the present need is only to about the
1300's. This is greatly considered because I believe you also
have a Mac version as well. Does the spreadsheet associated with
OpenOffice have this capability?
Thanks and che-ers
Bill B
As far as I can see, the answer is yes: Calc can display dates as far
back as you need. If you need to do calculations with dates, though,
you need to be fixed in one calendar (the Gregorian is default):
*calculations* with dates would fail if you have some values
expressed as Gregorian and some as Julian dates. (The same would
apply if you had some in Old Style and some in New Style.)
If you enter a date in Calc with the year expressed as only two
digits, the year is interpreted by default as being between 1930 and
2029, so "31 may 07" becomes today's date. If you were working
frequently in other centuries, you might find it convenient to modify
this by choosing another century as the default. You can do this at
Tools | Options | OpenOffice.org | General | Year (two digits). You
can always override this, of course, by typing the year explicitly:
"31 may 1307" becomes what it says despite whatever setting you have chosen.
Dates are stored internally as integers, so there has to be a zero of
the scale. By default this is 30 December 1899. But this doesn't
limit you: earlier dates are merely represented internally by
negative numbers. The only problem might be if you tried to transfer
your data in spreadsheet form between different spreadsheet
applications. But there are ways around that. Because of the way
that two-digit years are interpreted, it appears that it is
impossible conveniently to enter dates before 1 January 100. So that
limit is much earlier than you need.
I trust this helps.
Brian Barker
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