[ale] OpenOffice Spreadsheet and Dates

[Stephen R. Blevins]

Have you tried to enter the date as a *text* item.  I would have entered 
it as "05/30/1787  (closing quote mark not needed).

Stephen R. Blevins
srblevi at worldnet.att.net



Robert Reese wrote:
> 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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