There is no way to explicitly set a cell as a date type; all date are simply numeric values which Excel formats so that they appear to be dates. It is the standard idiom when using POI to do exactly as you are; create a format and apply that to the cell. Excel and OpenOffice do many things quite differently and I am not surprised to hear this is one of them; they are not directly comparable.
Is there a specific reason why you need the type to show as a date when you open the workbook using Excel? I think I am correct in saying that any date you create in this way using POI will function correctly if used in any mathmatical operation on the sheet. If it is critical to have the Date type then you might want to try a trick - one that I cannot promise will work. Create an Excel workbook with a sheet that contains a cell set to type date and with the correct format applied. Open the workbook using POI, get a reference to the sheet and read the cell in question from that. Once you have the cell, get the style applied to it and try applying that same style to other cells to see what happens. It maybe the case that this will circumvent the 'problem' but I cannot promise as I have never tried it out myself. Alternatively, find out exactly what format string is applied to a cell by Excel when you select the date option and try using that as the format string in POI. Again, I have never tried this and cannot promise it will work. -- View this message in context: http://apache-poi.1045710.n5.nabble.com/Set-cell-type-to-Date-tp5537937p5537985.html Sent from the POI - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
