Re: Locale

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 10:03:31AM +0000, Sam wrote:
> 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.
They store the dates as 'serial numbers' that are a slightly broken
counting of days since 1900/Jan/1.  They look exactly like numbers
accept for the formatting.
 
> And based on the locale on the machine running excel,
> the values would be read accordingly.
not quite.  Some of the formats are locale specific.  So excel will
say 'use default format 3' in some of its files and the user fill
get locale specific display of dates.  However, most formats are not
locale specific so if the user sets 'yyyy-dd-mmm' (I know that order is odd)
then the target machine will use it too.

> 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?
Gnumeric's corollary to Rule #3
    'Never underestimate the power of excel to do stupid things'

Be thankful that they never thought of doing the conversion, it
would be a nightmare.  Did you want to convert that with today's
exchange rate ? or is this historic ?  Excel stores the format
explicitly and leaves it alone.