[libreoffice-users] Calc: Inline Formatting

Two simple questions which should be available through Help, but I 
haven't been able to find anything.

1.  Is there a way to format content within a formula?  I need a cell 
that concatenates a properly-formatted date to some text, but I can't 
find any way to specify the date format.

2.  In conjunction with #1, is there a function to return an entire date 
in external format rather than having to get the month, day, and year 
separately?  All I've found is a way to convert a human date to an 
internal date.



Here's the background of what I'm trying to do, in case it's not all 
clear above.  I'm using Calc to replicate a form produced by another 
system; the other system only lets me go out a certain distance in the 
future but my client wants it for a longer period.  What I create won't 
be a perfect match, but it'll be close enough.  For this particular job, 
mainly due to other formatting issues, Calc is a better choice than Writer.

The date appears several times on the form, so I naturally just want to 
enter it once.  In two cases it appears after standard text that is 
centered in its cell.  I build the cell formula as

    =CONCATENATE("my text",$r$2)

where R2 is the cell in which I've entered the date.  The formula as 
written here returns the internal date, so I tried this one:

    =CONCATENATE("my text",MONTH($r$2),"/",DAY($r$2),"/",YEAR($r$2))

Unfortunately, this one gives me a single digit for the month and the 
day, and what I really want is MM/DD/YYYY.  If I could just do this 
inline it would be a lot easier than having to then figure out how Calc 
will generate leading zeroes for me (which would also require inline 
formatting or a lot more embedded functions).

Any ideas how to simplify this?

Dave


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