Email snippet

From: [Me]
To: [People]
Subject: [something pertaining to Excel spreadsheet problems]

…The issue is that the data stored are not the same as the data displayed. The Excel parser we use does not convert date cells to strings we can parse. And the reason why we've never encountered it before is that we always used CSV files rather than Excel spreadsheets...

However, it DOES have access to the format, e.g. date cells are tagged as type 3, and I managed to find out that Excel stores dates as the number of days since January 1, 1900, so I have modified the parser to convert type-3 cells to formatted datestamps offset from that date. (Actually, it wasn't quite that simple since PHP for stupid reasons cannot represent the year 1900 in datestamps!, so I had to use a workaround wherein I used the Unix Epoch as an offset...but the basic principle remains the same.)

I should have this tested, reviewed, and uploaded before lunchtime.

A bit of a weird and frustrating problem, but I love this stuff, deep down. It’s interesting.