Brian Barker wrote:
But it's not the locale setting at Tools | Options... | Language
Settings that controls this directly (as I'd imagined), but instead -
and as someone has already mentioned - the language of the current
paragraph style.
I vaguely remember from a couple of years ago that one could assign a
language or locale to a paragraph style, but a quick tour through the
paragraph format dialog in OOo3 did not reveal a way to do this. Please
tell us how.
It sounds like I have to experiment with many locales until I find one
with formats I like. Few users will put up with that.
This may be convenient for multilingual documents (I’ve written some,
but without dates and measurements), but to change the locale just to
get a date format is nothing but a kludge. A kludge that may have
unwelcome effects, such as switching the rôles of commas and dots in
number formats (very confusing) or changing the currency symbol. If that
happens in your document you are back to square one.
This might be more helpful if I could create my own locales, for
example, English-Eli or Latin or whatever, and set out whatever defaults
I wanted. Some corporations or government agencies might jump at such an
opportunity to enforce standards on their cmployees.
The simple, obvious solution, is to add a page to
Tools»Options»OOo»General which gives the user the chance to edit all
date, time, and number formats (except dictionaries, etc. which already
have their own page). This page should take its defaults from the user’s
preferences in the operating system. And of course, each document should
be able to keep its own formats.
But the claim I was trying to make still stands: that YYYY-MM-DD is
easily available in OpenOffice, although it is not what most users
will see at first when they use Insert | Fields > | Date.
Brian Barker
It is available, but not “easily” — there is no clue that you should
select Insert»Field»Other when Insert»Field»Date is at the top of the
list — and your average user has no idea that each paragraph can have
its own locale, let alone how to accomplish this.
There is a disconnect here between power users and casual users. OOo has
to serve both. Gracefully.
I feel strongly that any application is broken if it does not, as far as
possible, respect the user’s preferences as expressed in OS settings, or
allow the user to set preferences that will operate throughout the
application, and can be changed for individual documents and templates.
Unless, of course, there is a reason, and it better be a good one.
——Eli
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