Thanks for that, Bob. It looks as if CSV files are the way to go.
Two fairly technical points...
- If you are processing the CSV data and you need to create timestamps (e.g. if you are not using Excel to plot graphs, but some other package; and you are giving it Unix timestamps) you should add a time zone to the time string in order to properly characterise it. For example, in PHP, simply add the string " GMT" to the time string before using the strtotime() function on it.
- Similarly, if you are processing the JF data using PHP's strtotime() function, you should expect it to cope automatically with daylight saving. The reason is that if your PC defaulted to assuming DST when it produced the time string, it will most probably default to using DST when you do the conversion in the opposite direction. Problem solved!
However... although PHP behaves like that, Excel
appears not to, (i.e. it does not take DST into account when converting between timestamps and time strings) which means that there is no simple way of recovering from this problem in Excel. I use PHP for data processing and, to be honest, I wouldnt go near Excel with this BCMC data, but that's just a personal preference!
