Re: Locale

["Sam" <sam intramedia com sg>]

Hi Nick,

presumbly, If I'm not wrong, excel stores their date in a specific
format, ie: not dd/mmm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy or anything like that.
It is somewhat like Date=12, Month=6, Year=2002.

And based on the locale on the machine running excel,
the values would be read accordingly.

Of course you can specifically state the format of the date
string so that it can't run away or "translate" it for you,
by formatting the cell to be date and string is "dd-mmm-yyyy".

Another interesting question pops up now, if I were to format
a cell using currency in pounds, and open it up in a pc whose
locale is set to US $ for example. what will happen?

My guess is nothing will happen, excel isn't that smart to do
auto-currency conversion, or is it?

br,
xCurse



Nick Lamb writes:

> Here's an interesting question which I thought about before but put on the
> back burner when Gnumeric's locale support was very poor (1.0.x series)
> 
> In Excel do sheets / workbooks have a locale of their own?
> 
> Gnumeric's input routines, and many of its Excel-clone functions are
> dependent on locale information. What is a mere string on an American PC
> is a date, or a currency value in France or Japan.
> 
> When I take a British spreadsheet to a French computer it may break (as
> in, functions will return the wrong value or #errors and the sheet will
> not operate as expected).  Does that happen in Excel too?
> 
> If it's supposed to work this way then some of the test sheets ought to
> say in a heading font 'Test this sheet in locale fr_US.iso-8859-6' or
> whatever is appropriate (example was intentionally unlikely)
> 
> Nick.
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