Q: How can I open files created in ClarisWorks 2 or 3?

PC (Windows) systems calculate dates from a zero point of 1900, OS X uses 1904 (don't ask me why) it's such an old issue that it was solved while you and I were a lot younger. I don't know if this is a factor in your problem but it is a coincidence.

 

I suppose so. It is strange though. I can't see any reason for it, but like I said, I don't remember (20 years ago!) whether I defined it as a date field - or even if AW supported them. LibreOffice has definitely recognised them as dates though, as they were converted to American dates.

Don't understand that myself, I am not sure that this is even caused by that ancient difference.

And you should be able to reformat the date field from US to UK.

 

Yes, I did. It was easier than getting the 4 years back! It's just irritating that it converted them American-style to start with - after all, I set every Preference to 'English UK', except the User Interface which didn't have that option. I think it must be the User Interface that has resulted in dollars and MMDDYY, so perhaps that could be changed? (But for a free app, it's a minor miracle anyway)

And I don't get that behaviour, all formats are retained so again I have no answer, but at least it is a quick fix. Blame it on the NSA meddling.

Libre is so good (especially for a free app) that I sent them some money. I hope they spend it on filters for Access and AW/CW database and graphics files.

Hello,

concerning the 1900/1904 date problem, normally this problem was fixed in libmwaw-0.3.2 (*). The problem was that the dates are stored as decimal numbers: the number of days since 1/1/1904, so when I find a date format, I must read the date's decimal number and convert it to a date using standard date functions and I forgot to change the origin back to 1900 before calling these functions.

Concerning the language format's problem, actually, I only find that a cell must be displayed using the first/second/... date/time/number formats. As I do not know how to retrieve the language of the document (**), I choose to use the US formats lacking a better solution :-~ So I do not know if this can be fixed and how to fix it :-~

(*) which may only appear in LibreOffice 4.4.0. You can test if it is repaired by downloading mwawOSX on the libmwaw download pages : https://sourceforge.net/projects/libmwaw/files/

(**) I do not even know if it is stored in the document or if it is the localized application which defined it :-~

Csound1 wrote:

 

PC (Windows) systems calculate dates from a zero point of 1900, OS X uses 1904 (don't ask me why)

The advantage of using 1904 is that every fourth year is a leap year right through to 2099; 1900 was not a leap year but 2000 was. If you start from January 1900 you have to allow for no February 29th. (Centuries are not leap years but millennia are.) Early pocket calculators with date calculations used 1904 as the start point for this reason.

Modern computers can take this into account easily enough - OSX calendar shows the correct dates for February 1900.

Thanks for that, one less thing that I don't know I'll get on the rest later.

I have no idea whether this is a factor in the OP's scenario, just noting the coincidental nature