Re: [libreoffice-users] Formatting a date

At 07:19 19/02/2015 -0800, Mark Howe wrote:
> -----Original Message----- From: Brian Barker
> Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2015 7:05 AM
> Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Formatting a date
> > At 06:41 19/02/2015 -0800, Mark Howe wrote:
> > > I have text: 19 February 2015. The format for the cell is date 
> > > 2/19/2015, but it will not acknowledge that or sort correctly. As 
> > > if it's formatted for date but not accepting that fact. What did I do wrong?
> >
> > If you want your existing values to be genuine dates - as you will 
> > want to do if you need to include them in calculations or even just 
> > sort them - you must first convert the text into the equivalent 
> > date. Fortunately. the DATEVALUE() function is available to do this 
> > for you. Just put =DATEVALUE(Xn) in another column and fill down.
>
> I interpreted what you wrote to mean that =datevalue(a1) would 
> convert the contents of A1 into a date.

Yup - provided that the value in A1 is a "valid date expression".

> It did not and produced err502. What am I missing?

Then what is in A1 cannot be what Calc considers (in your locale) to 
be a valid date expression. The DATEVALUE() function seems very 
robust to me: it can cope with many date formats and doesn't seem to 
be fazed by extra blanks, though it can be by extraneous commas.

Is it possible that you have a column heading in A1?

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker


--
To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscribe@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted