[ale] OpenOffice Spreadsheet and Dates

[Brian Pitts]

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

Thanks,
Brian