It would appear that on Feb 2, Andreas Saeger did say:

> Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:
> > I ask because I have a writer document with a table in it I use to provide
> > my doctor with a record of my daily blood glucose test data. I use my own
> > personal time of day notation. It does NOT conform to any formally defined
> > time format. And as far as I'm concerned, If I don't tell the table to
> > specifically assume that table cell is supposed to contain a date it
> > shouldn't be converting it anyway. 
> > It drives me to distraction whenever my date is converted from:
> > 
> > 11:20 am to 11:20:00 AM
> > 
> 
> This has exactly nothing to do with auto-correction of text values or any type
> of conversion. It is a useful and wanted behaviour when you enter numbers
> without applying any number format. Times and dates are ordinary decimal
> numbers on a time scale, formatted in a special way.

Useful & wanted by some, perhaps even many but not by me.
 
> The most simple solution is: Simply apply any number format you want to see.
> Then it makes no difference if you type "13:30", "1:30pm" or anything
> equivalent. The numbers will always be shown as you want to see them. If you
> refuse to format, you've got to live with some default format which at least
> indicates that your input has been accepted as a valid numeric time value.

Yeah, but before I learned from this thread how to turn off number
recognition, I did that very thing. As much as I hated to have to repeat
the process every time I created a new table, I routinely marked the whole
table and used <alt>+an to set the number format to text... Unfortunately I
use more than one distribution of linux which supply more than one version
of OO.o, And the number format that worked with Elive's OO.o v2.4 didn't
work when I would mount the same data drive and work with the same table in
the same file with Sabayon's OO.o v 3.1... 

> Number formatting is far more convenient than turning off number recognition
> which forces you to type all the formatted values in full verbosity ending up
> with values that sort alphabetically and do not respond to any calculation
> (Min, Max, Count may be usefull at times).
> With currency formatting your can type the raw figures and always get the
> wanted digits and symbol.
> 
> Or take a list of long dates:
> > Friday, 1 January 2010
> > Saturday, 2 January 2010
> > Sunday, 3 January 2010
> 
> has been typed in as "2/1", "3/1", "1/1", sorted in numeric order and then
> formatted. You can format the same numbers in different ways without retyping
> anything.
 
Which is why, (now that I know how to toggle Number recognition on and off)
that I now accept the existence of such a tool as a good thing. Though I'm
not likely to ever use it. Still, If I were to need to sort a large table
by date, I might just temporarily turn number recognition back on and then
set the number format of that column to date... Though I'd probably wind up
doing a lot of manual re-editing later to get my preferred non-rigid date
short hand back. But then again, if I planned on doing a lot of that kind of
sorting, I'd likely be using calc rather than writer anyway...

-- 
|   ---   ___
|   <0>   <->      Joe (theWordy) Philbrook
|       ^               J(tWdy)P
|    ~\___/~         <<[email protected]>>


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