Why doesn't LibreOffice Calc support [D] in time format codes for elapsed days?

[jarkky]

I’m working with elapsed time in LibreOffice Calc and trying to format a cell to show total days, hours, minutes, and seconds—similar to Excel’s [D]:HH:MM:SS format.

In Calc, [HH]:MM:SS works fine for showing total hours beyond 24, but [D] or [DD] isn’t accepted in the format code. Using DD just shows the day of the month (e.g., “01” for September 1st), not the total number of days elapsed.

Is there a reason [D] isn’t supported for durations? Is this a known limitation, or should I submit a feature request?

I’d prefer not to use manual formulas like INT(B2-A2) or TEXT(MOD(…)) if native formatting could handle it.

Thanks in advance!

[EarnestAl]

How about =DAYS(B2;A2) ? You will get the number of days but just a decimal portion, not HH:MM:SS, for the partial day

[mikekaganski]

@jarkky

Is this a known limitation, or should I submit a feature request?

This is a wrong dichotomy. Yes it is a known limitation, and yes you are welcome to submit a feature request. While it would be unreasonable for months and years, because these time spans are not exact, it is different for days, where one could want to combine days, hours, minutes in a duration format.

And of course, for a simple case of days (without hours/minutes, but maybe with a fraction of a day), a plain difference of two datetimes, represented as a number (and maybe truncated, as you prefer), would do the job - as you shown; which likely was one of the reasons it wasn’t considered as a feature. In Calc, we also consider problems of interoperability, which is: assume we introduce the feature. Then people start screaming, that saving that to XLSX doesn’t work!!!111111 - of course, it’s because Calc is bad, not because Excel doesn’t support it.

[fpy]

Time interval between 2x dates/hours

What about? It could be possible to implement it in LibreOffice if it was defined by ODF at the cost that it wouldn’t work in Excel nor any other .xls|.xlsx or format codes reading application, or could even make the document fail to load properly when read by such if it checked. Note that Mike’s link yields 404 now as it was an interim candidate standard version, the final release’s attribute section is Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Version 1.3. Part 3: OpenDocume…