[libreoffice-users] Re: Apostrophe prepended to MM/DD/YYYY

"Trial of Libre Office" was not the correct place. Please excuse me.
Brian Barker had some things to say about it and he did offer some help 
which I appreciate. I did use the prefix "Open". openSCAD is what I was 
working with earlier and I mistakenly started typing "opencalc". 
Everything I'm talking about is LibreOffice_calc here and I'm quite sure 
there is no "openOffice" hiding. In fact I thought that was killed by 
Oracle years ago.

Brian had some questions about how I read, with curl and perl5, the csv 
files which seemed to be applying an apostrophe to dates formatted as 
MM/DD/YYYY. I have done some searching and it appears that I just don't 
understand date formats in LibreOffice_calc.  Some while-trying comments:

Managed to open *.csv into new window using the suggested procedures.
Copy and paste into BANK worksheet worked OK in the far right area 
starting at column K

I selected the csv data and performed a copy followed by a paste into my 
worksheet but moved over to the right starting at column K.

Some samples of the data from the comma separated file:
   K                       L M N            O
08/17/2016    08/19/2016    GH BASS & CO #4385 JEFFERSONVILLOH    
52.27    Merchandise
08/17/2016    08/19/2016    PEPPERIDGE FARM - 328 JEFFERSONVILLOH 
16.06    Restaurants
08/17/2016    08/19/2016    WS OUTLET 0463 
JEFFERSNVILLEOH0001000161651608171518    56.28    Merchandise

to match into the ledger page I use these formulas and then convert the 
results to values so I can add the lines to the ledger and sort by one 
of the date columns.
A =K172, B =L172,  (C) 9/27, (D) DISC, (E) B,  F =N172, (G) DISC, H =M172
These values are loaded into the left side columns with a fill down.
Row 172 is one of 166 to 197 this month but it varies. Other downloaded 
data, banks, use the space above row 172.

Formulas  =K167, =L167 in columns A and B seem ok as copies

____But _____
Copy and paste-special adds a ' at the start of the MM/DD/YYYY date.
I can't sort by date anymore!

Changing the format for columns A and B to date doesn't help.

Format-NumberFormat-date selection applied to A and B columns.
now do the copy and paste special selecting just date/time
  columns A and B become blank on row 169

Selecting date/time and numbers does the same thing

>>Selecting date/time, numbers, text generates the leading apostrophe.<<

Copy  starting at columns K and L
and paste special with date/time, numbers, text does the same thing.

Can someone point me to the book I should be reading? It isn't Excel! 
This is only one of the problems I was having in the badly addressed 
earlier message.

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