[ale] OpenOffice Spreadsheet and Dates

[Robert Reese]

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********
On 4/14/2008 at 12:48 AM Brian Pitts wrote:

>Robert Reese wrote:
> > 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.
>
>This results in the cells being displayed as -41121 etc. for me too.
>
>Stephen R. Blevins wrote:
>> 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).
>
>I'll do that if I have to, but I was hoping that rather than having to 
>add a marker to each cell there would be a way to tell openoffice "hey, 
>this column is full of text, don't automagically alter it". Based on the 
>behavior I got when I changed the formatting, I'm worried that even if 
>there is a way to do this it's too late.


Try exporting it as a CSV, then do some find-and-replace magic.  Import back into a clean spreadsheet.  Actually, you might be able to get away without having to do any find-and-replace and simply import into a blank spreadsheet and tell the import that the value is text for that field.

Cheers,
Robert~

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