At 11:03 24/02/2018 -0800, Dave Stevens wrote:
I'm using the version in the subject line on Linux Mint. In calc if I insert the date using the insert menu and the date option I get a cell with today's date, formatted comprehensibly.

I'm not sure what you mean here. If you are using the =TODAY() or =NOW() functions, what you have is not today's date but the current date whenever your spreadsheet is reopened.

If I do the same thing in Writer I can't, the option isn't there. I must (as far as I know) choose field then date. That gives me text that looks like "Date (fixed)" which is not what I want. I can do a print preview and see that it will render as one might wish but that's not what I want. I really want to be able to simply insert today's date as a character string.

I think your only problem here is that you have fields set to show the field name instead of their value. You can toggle this display at View | Field Names (or Ctrl+F9). Then you will see the date value as text in the editing display as well as in Page Preview and actual printout.

Can anyone tell me a simple way to insert the data as characters rather than a field?

o Copy the field.
o Paste it back over itself, but using Edit | Paste Special... (or right-click | Paste Special... or Ctrl+Shift+V) and selecting "Unformatted text" in the Paste Special dialogue.

Er, or just type the date: the default format is only eight characters (in my locale).

I think the behaviour I'm seeing breaks wysiwyg.

I hope so. Wysiwyg was always a bad idea: what you need in the editing display is a clear indication of the structure of your document, not necessarily its appearance. That way, you can see and have some control over what will happen when it is displayed on another system or you (or others) make any change.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker


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

Reply via email to