Does not support reading date/time fields as text

[shawndromat]

Our dates are in a format that is getting incorrectly parsed by the default parsing strategies.

Our date format is y-mmm, e.g. "16-Aug" for month of August, no day, year 2016
Roo/Roo-xls give us a Date object for 2017-08-16 for month of August, day 16, year 2017

sheet.cell(1,1) => #<Date: 2017-08-16 ((2457982j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)>

In Roo for .xlsx files, we've been using the #formatted_value method as a workaround. It reformats the date object which essentially gives us the underlying string.

sheet.formatted_cell(1,1) => "16-AUG"

The #formatted_value method is a bit of a hacky workaround but is serving us well enough. But there seems to be no way to get the underlying string representation of a Date, Time, or DateTime field for .xls files in roo-xls.

[NahianAlindo]

I had a similar problem where I entered a date like 6/1/2024 in excel spreadsheet in an xlsx file but the date became some big digit 45297 which is actually an offset from 30 Dec 1899. so, you could build a date object or time object if you have an number which represents the object like the following:

Date.new(1899, 12, 30) + offset_number
Time.new(2024,1,1) + offset_number * 86_400

after that you could just use the Date and Time class of Ruby and related methods to do what you want.
N.B: the offset_number can be an integer or a float. and 86400 is just the seconds in a day so, offset_number 0.5 multiplied by 86400 would give you 12pm for a Time object using the offset number from the beginning of some day.