Changes in Daylight Savings Time should not directly affect OfficeWriter (for Excel or Word), as our product makes no hard-coded changes to dates and times based on Daylight Savings Time. Rather, OfficeWriter relies on the underlying runtime environment. Therefore, it is important to make sure that your system is appropriately patched so that the correct information will be returned to OfficeWriter when dates and times are being handled.
The following articles may be helpful for making sure your system is up to date:
Windows: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/timezone/dst2007.mspx
Java: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/USDST/
Differences between Excel and Word
Dates and times are handled differently in ExcelWriter and WordWriter. Again, in both cases, we rely on the runtime environment for Daylight Savings Time adjustments, but it may be useful to understand these differences.
ExcelWriter
In Excel, dates are stored as a number representing how much time has elapsed since Jan 1, 1900 (see this KB article). When ExcelWriter inserts dates into an Excel spreadsheet, it takes the value from the database or application code and converts it to this special number required by Excel. ExcelWriter looks at the locale of the server or the application, checks to see if Daylight Savings Time applies to the particular date, and adds or subtracts an hour accordingly. ExcelWriter does not have any internal information about Daylight Savings Time. It does the check using method calls to the OS, .NET runtime, or Java runtime (depending on which version of ExcelWriter you are running).
WordWriter
In Word, dates and times are stored as strings. Therefore, WordWriter simply takes the value provided by the application code or database and converts it to a string. It does no additional calculations. WordWriter is totally dependent on the date and time information provided by your application.
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