[libreoffice-users] Help with date formatting

I have recently switched from OpenOffice to LibreOffice (version 3.5.0), 
and am having problems configuring it to handle dates in the same way.

These are the problems:

1. I want to maintain a CSV file containing dates in the format 
DD/MM/YY.  When I read that file into OO, the columns containing those 
dates were automatically recognized as date columns, not text columns, 
and the dates were read correctly.  Is there a way to configure LO to do 
the same?

For example, some typical lines at the top of the input file might look like

"Date1","Date2","Text1","Value1","Text2","Text3","Value2","Value3","Value4"
02/03/12,02/03/12,"TEXT",,,"TEXT",,,-100
01/03/12,01/03/12,"TEXT",1,"TEXT","TEXT",,,5.95

and the dates are March 2, 2012 on the first line, March 1, 2012 on the 
second.

2.  I would also like the dates to be displayed in the same format 
within LO.  Currently it thinks those lines are text, and displays them 
like that, but of course sorting fails.  If I manually tell it that 
those are DMY dates when I read the file, they are displayed as 
YYYY-MM-DD format after reading.  I can manually set the format to the 
user defined DD/MM/YY format, but it doesn't display that way in the 
data entry line, it displays as YYYY-MM-DD format.

3.  If I manually enter a date into a cell, I would like the same thing 
to happen.  Currently if I type 02/03/12 as data, it is converted to the 
date 2002-03-12.

4.  If I write that CSV file back out to CSV, I would like it to 
maintain the same DD/MM/YY format.


I suspect all of this could be fixed if I could find some localization 
setting that says dates are by default formatted as DD/MM/YY on both 
input and output, but I can't find that setting.  Is there such a thing?

Duncan Murdoch


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