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------- Additional comments from [email protected] Sun Jun 6 08:59:07 +0000 2010 ------- OK, I'm late joining in on this bug, but it's annoyed me for many years. I thought I understood what was really going on here, but it appears I don't. Here's me being as clear as I can be: - I want ISO 8601 dates in OO Calc. I want to be able to *edit cells* in ISO 8601. - According to the "this is not a bug" camp, when editing date values OO uses the system locale. - I edited my system locale files to use ISO 8601 for en_GB (my preferred locale), ran locale-gen, and logged off and back on. - Other programs are using ISO 8601 now, so I think I did it correctly. - OO Calc is still using the original en_GB date format! (At least it's not en_US...) So, either I've missed something while editing my locale files, or OpenOffice is using its own copies of the various locales. I really hope that's not the case, and I fervently hope that that's not by design if it is. Doesn't that completely break how locales are supposed to work? Can someone help me out here? WHAT DO I NEED TO DO TO GET ISO 8601 DATES IN CELL EDITING? And more importantly, WHAT DO I NEED TO DO TO GET IT IN ENGLISH? If this is not a bug, answer those two questions, please. If there is no way to get ISO 8601 in English, THAT IS A BUG. End of debate, and someone needs to fix it. (BTW, I already tried setting OO to Hungarian -- it has a two-digit year, so that won't do. Lithuanian... well, we'll see. I was amused to see that in the default format, today's date comes out as "2010 metų birželio mėnesio 6 diena".) It also bears pointing out that in various places in the OO user interface, dates are shown in American format regardless of the program or system locale (have a look at the Calc > Calculate options, for instance). That might explain some of the deafness this bug appears to be falling on - the developers are comfortable with month-day-year, and don't understand why anyone would want anything else. So, here's a brief list of things ISO 8601 can do that month-day-year can't: - be unambiguous. - sort lexicographically (e.g. 2009-02-13 comes before 2010-01-13 even when you're sorting as text, whereas m-d-y would give you ). - avoid y2k problems (a lot of people using m-d-y still seem to write only two digits for the year -- which is part of this bug, too). - be consistent with how you write times -- larger units go in front of smaller ones. You wouldn't like a watch that formatted minutes:seconds:hours, so why would write your dates that way? - if you only care about the year and month, or only the year, you can chop off the rest and it's still unambiguous: 2010-06, or 2010. Give it a try; you might like it. (But you might have to fix this bug first if you want to try it in OpenOffice ;) ) --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please do not reply to this automatically generated notification from Issue Tracker. Please log onto the website and enter your comments. http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_issues.html#notification --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
