Re: date/time-stamp function

[hala cse unsw edu au (Harald Richard Ashburner)]

Adam J. Henry said:
> Hi.  I'm interested in using Gnumeric to record time spent on work
> projects.  I'm looking for suggests to accomplish the following goals:
>
>       A way to find the difference in two date/time stamps.
>
>       A quick way to insert a date/time stamp.  This would mark the
>       current date and time, but would not be changed every time I
>       reload the spreadsheet (as with the NOW() function).  While
>       not a primary requirement, it would be nice.  However, I need
>       to know what format to enter a datetimestamp in so that I can
>       later find the difference (in seconds).
>
> I've spent about an hour trying to figure out a way to do this, and have
> looked around Google for relevant information after reading the docs.
> Also, an Excel-person here says it is not possible to do.  It would be
> nice to call him out. ;)
Ctrl + ; => inserts the current date in a cell
Ctrl + : => inserts the current time in a cell

you can subtract one time from another using = A2-A1 or whatever, then
it's just a question of making sure the result is the correct format.
Format->cells and choose something like [h]:mm:ss

Dates are stored as an integer being the number of days since January 1
1900

Time is stored as a fraction of a day. eg 0 is midnight, 0.5 midday,
        0.75 is 6pm

both are displayed as dates, times or both date and time by selecting
the correct format.

IIRC that is the same as Excel.

Right now, here the current date and time is 38250.3875...
or, formatted as m/dd/y h:mm
9/20/04 9:18

Hope that helps.
-- 
Kind regards,
Hal Ashburner