Fronius Datalogger Data Processing

This posting is really for the benefit of me. I have a Datalogger Pro datalogger on our PV system. I download the data every week or so, though I am currently installing some networking cable so it is a little easier and i'd then download it more frequently.
When I download the data, I can export it into an Excel spreadsheet file, it looks like this:

The date is in DD/MM/YYYY format. I was having problems when I opened the file up in Excel or OpenOffice Calc [what i use at home]. The dates were all in "text" format. If I tried to plot the date and kW the chart wouldn't work because the X axis would be text and not numbers. Hummm, what to do. Google, of course.

Solution 1.

1. Click a blank cell formatted as a number cell and enter 1 in the cell.
2. Go to Edit | Copy.
3. Select the cells that contain the text values that you want to convert.
4. Go to Edit | Paste Special.
5. In the Operation section, click Multiply.
6. Click OK

This worked on my work computer, but not on my PC at home. It is a good way to convert text to numbers (or dates) but it just wasn't working. More Google.

Solution 2.

In the Control Panel, I have my region set to Canada, and therefore the date format is day/month/year [DD/MM/YYYY].  But in OpenOffice Calc, there were several date formats, shown to the right.

But since the data in the Fronius logger file was DD/MM/YYYY but there was not a corresponding format in Calc, the dates were being saved in the spreadsheet as text because Calc did not recognise the format. Perhaps if the format in the datalogger spreadsheet file was saved as 2012-02-23 it would import as a number/date, but that was not the case. Therefore, I created a new format in the form of DD/MM/YYYY as follows:

• Format → Cells → Numbers → Category → Date dialog

Then enter the custom date that I needed. Presto, next time I opened up the spreadsheet and copied-pasted the dates, they were recognised as dates and not as text.

Whew, now I finally get to update my big spreadsheet of all the solar data. That will be my next posting.