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willard
April 10th, 2002, 05:08 PM
I'm trying out TinySheet 4.11 and I've found a couple of problems with cell formatting.

1) I prefer to set the PalmOS date format to "Y-M-D" (actually "YY-M-D"), as that's as close as I can get to the ISO date standard. But when I enter a date into a standard cell, it's immediately rewritten "YY-D-M". In the Cell Format dialog, there's *no way* to make the TinySheet date format agree with the system one. In fact most of the choices are screwy:

3-12 (D-M)
97-3-12 (YY-D-M)
97-03-12 (YY-DD-M)
Dec-3
97-Dec-3
97-Dec-03
1997-3-12 (YYYY-D-M)

Most of these don't correspond to any date format people actually use, as far as I know. It sorta looks to me like someone took the good ol' American M/D/YY formats, replaced '/' with '-', and turned the entire date around! If the developers don't want to give us sensible choices, at least they should allow the user to edit the format using standard strftime(3c) codes (e.g. "%Y-%m-%d" for "2002-04-10"), or whatever codes Excel uses.

2) There seems to be *no way* to format a cell as plain old text. I was baffled when a text string (actually a string of hex) kept automagically turning into "[inf]", until I realized that the string (6e1234 or something similar) was being interpreted as "6 x 10^1234". There should be a way to tell TinySheet to just leave the cell contents alone, damn it.

charlesball
August 27th, 2002, 12:13 PM
I have exactly the same problem with TinySheet 4.2, and I agree, the available date formats don't make any sense. YY-DD-M or YY-D-M? Or, for that matter, YYYY-D-M? Weird stuff.

Presumably, this only affects those of us who set the PalmOS date format to YY-M-D, but that should be a pretty common choice.

MoonCactus
September 5th, 2002, 06:57 AM
Hi,

1) Date formatting
You are right about TS4 date formatting. Actual design is still based on original American standard and it sadly lacks European or Japanese formats. BTW I am French and I never understood the American logics behind Y/D/M or M/D/Y formats ;-). This is something which is truly getting annoying so we will try to provide some improvement in the next release, till a generic Excel format is available (TS5?). For both synchronization and data storage reason, only one out of seven predefined choices is possible in releases.

2) Just like Excel does, 6e23 or 6/2/02 inputs are interpreted as numbers and dates respectively. If you really meant the litteral string, please add a single quote to the beginning of the input and TS4 (and Excel) will not interpret it.

Regards,
Jim