[libreoffice-users] Re: Calc cell formats

Am 03.10.2015 um 04:23 schrieb Thomas:
> Wonderful. And HOW do I tell Calc (AND remember that setting!) that
> entering simply "33" in a cell is NOT a date???
> As I said: I tried to set numbers to standard and date to "1999/01/10"
> format.

PLEASE! This is the exact same matter in all spreadsheets of the past 30
years. This has never changed and it will not change in future.

Spreadsheets know decimal numbers and text. Both types of values are
explicitly NOT convertible by any kind of formatting attributes.

You can enter anything including "123" and "=SUM(A1:B3)" as literal text
by formatting the cell as text _before_ entering the value or by a
preceeding apostrophe. Otherwise, _any_ of your spreadsheet applications
will _always_ try to interprete your input as a number or as a formula
because this is what all spreadsheets make useful.

All dates, times, currencies, percents, booleans, scientific numbers,
fractions are nothing but different number formats for the _same_
decimal values which means that the date 2009-07-06 is the _exact_same_
value as 40000 (try out) and so are 4000000%, 7/6/2009, 6/7/2009,
4,00E+004, 40.000,00 € and $40,000.00. However, all these visual
representations of fourtythousand are different strings of text when
entered as text. You must never format any spreadsheet cells as text
unless you know exactly that you need that (in very rare cases, actually).

If you want to enter any kind of date on the num pad, the following used
to work with all types of spreadsheets, including LO 3.5, but LO 3.6
messed it up.
20/ --> this month's 20th day
20/7 --> this year's 20th of July
7/20 --> same in US context
The appearance of that entry is completely unrelevant as long as you
entered the correct value which is 42205 in case of 20 July 2015. You
can format that value any way you want but it has to be the correct
number. LO introduced that idiotic "date recognition pattern" in the
language options which may make everything more complicated than the
above simple entry pattern.

When importing plain text from files or from clipboard, you must never
forget to check the "special numbers" option unless you know exactly
that you want to avoid full number recognition.

Unlike Excel, booleans are not a third data type. Boolean is just a
number format.

All the rest (including the availlable number formats) depend on the
global locale setting in the language options.



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