NoOp wrote:
I did find that if I set the Default style (in OOo Calc) to Swedish
(Sweden) and then the Date format to YYYY-MM-DD, the numbers displayed
in the cell and in the formula bar are 2009-12-13. So that may be worth
experimenting with also.
Hi,
Allow me to abstract the discussion beteen Dotan and me.
Dotan would like to see dotted decimals with ISO-dates because he always
sees US dates by default. As far as I know, there is no such locale
availlable. Swedes use comma decimals.
With application locale "Hebrew" he should never see US-style dates
except explicitly formatted ones. Application locale "Default" defaults
to the OOo locale that comes as close as possible to evironment variable
$LANG (Linux), disregarding all the other environment settings. If $LANG
is unset or invalid when OOo starts up, then (and only then) everything
falls back to US English (but app locale "Hebrew" should fix that anyway
as far as OOo is concerned).
Then he claims that Excel automagically formats yyyy-mm-dd input. I
doubt that, but I can not test with a recent version of it.
A common background of the that claim is that Excel allows to work with
literal strings as if they were numbers. Many (most?) Excel users do not
even know the difference between a numeric value and the equally looking
string. They format everything with centered orientation, sometimes
worrying about the strange sort order. Only in very rare cases a
co-worker notices wrong caclulations in the same file, using the same
Excel version due to a different locale.
OOo 3.2 will be shipped with a better implementation of that text-number
magic. It will return #VALUE in most cases unless the numeric text is
unambiguous, which is only the case with ISO dates and integers.
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/3.2.0rc1.html ("Calculate
with strings").
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