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The document discusses how date and time are stored and displayed from historical data collected by the Continuous Historian. It can present timestamps in GMT, local time, or with a GMT offset. When viewed in Excel, dates are stored as serial numbers and times as decimal fractions. Converting between GMT and local time can cause issues when daylight saving time is in effect, as the length of a day may change. Reports showing data over a single day need to account for these differences to avoid missing or duplicating hours during DST transitions.

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47 views1 page

Untitled Extract Pages33

The document discusses how date and time are stored and displayed from historical data collected by the Continuous Historian. It can present timestamps in GMT, local time, or with a GMT offset. When viewed in Excel, dates are stored as serial numbers and times as decimal fractions. Converting between GMT and local time can cause issues when daylight saving time is in effect, as the length of a day may change. Reports showing data over a single day need to account for these differences to avoid missing or duplicating hours during DST transitions.

Uploaded by

Anonymous QucKa3TCBN
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Storage of Date and Time

The Continuous Historian stores timestamps using Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). The Continuous Historian Excel
Add-In supports viewing historical data in three ways:
• GMT - Dates and times are presented as they were recorded by the Continuous Historian.
• Local Time - Dates and times are presented in the user's local time as it applied at the time of the recording.
For example, if the event occurred during daylight saving time, it will be presented showing the daylight
saving local time even when viewed outside daylight saving time.
• GMT Offset - Dates and times are presented with a fixed, user-configurable, offset (+/- hh:mm) from GMT.
This offset will be constant, and will disregard daylight saving time. This mode would be useful where data
is viewed in a different locale from where it was recorded. It will allow the data to be viewed in an
approximation of the local time of the plant.

Storage and Precision


In Excel, dates are stored as sequential numbers, called serial values. By default, January 1, 1900 is serial number 1,
and January 1, 2008 is serial number 39448 because it is 39,448 days after January 1, 1900. Times are stored as
decimal fractions because time is considered a portion of a day. Thus 0.5 represents 12:00:00 (noon). Date/time
values are stored in Excel worksheets as floating point numbers: the sum of the date's serial number and the time's
fraction. Using cell formatting, Excel allows times to be displayed with millisecond precision, for example: MM/DD/
YYYY hh:mm:ss.000, although it should be noted that the Continuous Historian records data on quarter-second
boundaries: .000, .250, .500, .750.)
Excel's method of storing times does not handle leap seconds, since in converting from a decimal fraction to a user-
readable time format (such as “MM/DD/YYYY hh:mm:ss.000”) Excel is working on the assumption that there are
86,400 seconds in a day. In a day containing a leap second, there are actually 86,401 seconds. Excel will never
convert a time such that the value for seconds is greater than 59. Hence it is not possible to see the leap second at the
end of 1998 (31 Dec 1998 11:59:60).

Conversion Between GMT and Local Time


In parts of the world where daylight saving time is used, users must be aware of issues arising from conversion
between GMT and local times. Where daylight saving time is never used (for example, Arizona) there is no problem
converting from GMT to local time and back again since there is a one-to-one correlation between GMT and Local
times. The conversion problems arise from the fact that changes to or from daylight saving time affect the length of a
day. In the case of changing to daylight saving time, an hour is skipped altogether in local time, whereas the change
back from daylight saving time leads to certain local times occurring twice.
If you wish to create a report that shows one day's worth of data for your plant, you could do so using the Configure
Calculated Data Function worksheet function dialog, supplying a start time and end time exactly one day apart. These
times would most likely be specified in cells in the worksheet with an array formula referring to them by cell address.
Furthermore, the end time is likely to be expressed by a formula such as StartTime + “24:00:00”. Excel ignores
daylight saving time when calculating such formulas, so the end time would show as being the same hour, exactly
one day later than the start time. For 363 days in the year (except for leap years), this array function would return 24
hours worth of data; but for one day each year there would be 23 hours worth of data and for another day there would
be 25 hours worth of data.
You need to be aware that this will occur if you are using local time, and design your worksheets accordingly. That is,
allow extra space in the table to accommodate the extra data as daylight saving time finishes; the table will be shorter
as daylight saving time begins.

166 System Configuration

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