When copying a column of dates from one spreadsheet and pasting into another spreadsheet, the pasted date column does not match the copied column. What am I doing wrong?
You don’t comment about the file types and your OS and LibreOffice version. But verify Menu/Tools/Options/LibreOffice calc/Calculate - Date has the same option in both.
Yes, it was a different base date. cut & paste dates differed by 1462 days. The from spreadsheet has been in continuous use since 1990 and has the 1904 base date (from excel?).Moved to LibreOffice around 10 years ago. The new spreadsheet used a different base date than the old, imported one. Thanks all.
If you told the difference it may have been more obvious, but likely the documents use a different base or null date, for example 1904-01-01 instead of the default 1899-12-30, in which case the dates would differ by 1462 days (4 years and 2 days). If it was 1900-01-01 instead the differences would be 2 days. Or a combination of those two. If it’s something different please explain more details.
The null date can be selected under Tools → Options → Calc → Calculate. CAVEAT! If this date is changed all dates in the document change accordingly as dates are stored in days since the null date. Furthermore, subsequent new documents created use the changed null date.
Unless there’s a compelling reason to keep it for application interoperability, best is to fix the document that does not use the 1899-12-30 null date, i.e. switch to 1899-12-30 null date and add 1462 days to all date values; adding days can be done by entering the value 1462 into a cell, copy that to clipboard, then select all date and date+time cells and Shift+Ctrl+V Paste Special with Operations Add. If that is not feasible then adjust the pasted date column and subtract the days using the same mechanism.