[ale] OpenOffice Spreadsheet and Dates

[Robert Reese]

Hi Brian,

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********
On 4/13/2008 at 10:54 PM Brian Pitts wrote:

>Somewhat off topic since OpenOffice is cross-platform, but I'm sure the 
>list will appreciate a chance to bash Microsoft.
>
>I have a spreadsheet in OpenOffice where I've been entering dates like 
>5/30/1787. I need to share this spreadsheet with someone using Microsoft 
>Excel 2003. My problem is that OpenOffice recognizes that a cell in the 
>format mm/dd/yyyy is a date and treats it differently than if it was 
>simply text. When I export the document in xls format, OpenOffice 
>converts 5/30/1787 to -41121. This seems to be the right thing to do 
>since, according to Microsoft, Excel stores dates as the offset in days 
>from January 1, 1990. [0] Unfortunately, Excel can not display any date 
>before January 1, 1990 (i.e. a "negative" date). Thus I would like 
>OpenOffice to stop converting what I entered and simply save the text 
>5/30/1787. How can I get it to do this without altering every cell where 
>I've stored a date?
>
>[0] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/180162


Try selecting the entire column and changing the format to text and see if that fixes it for you.  Go to Format > Cells > Numbers tab and choose text.  (At least in the Windows version).

Cheers,
Robert~

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