Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 30216
Ability to set the default date format
Last modified: 2017-05-20 10:44:26 UTC
Hi, I added the following comments to issue 6180 which has now been closed. As advised I am raising a new issue. I've noticed the issue to set the default date format appears quite often in the users mailing list. For example for Australia when I select Insert -> Fields -> Date, I get the format DD/MM/YY. I would like the ability to set the default date format to DD MMM YYYY or DD MMMM YYYY. This issue is not about changing the date once it is inserted. It is about setting the underlying default date format separate from the locale. Another scenario is where people wish to conform to the YYYY-MM-DD standard because this is their organisation's standard, whilst the country standard may be MM-DD-YYYY. The default date can be set in Calc (using templates), but there does not appear to be such a feature with Writer. The ability to set the default date in Writer IMHO is a basic requirement. It is not a major issue, just an inconvenience. In MS Word this is very easy to do. Thanks Kelvin
reassigned to BH.
This is a very important enhancement suggestion. Fundamentally, it's a question of application maturity/flexibility. Users should be able to change standard defaults such as date-type - if they are forced to use workarounds (such as Autotext-ing), it only underlines the limitations of the application.
voting
Hi Mathias, I have changed the current owner to your owner. Please take the ownership of these enhancements.
I strongly feel that an application which does not respect its users’ preferences is poorly designed, or maybe even broken. The default date, time, and number formats should be taken from the operating system where possible. The user should be able to set their own formats throughout OOo, including dialogs, and for individual documents. The user should not be forced to use “locale” settings, which cannot always match the needs of particular industries or organizations, or the quirks of guys like me. This problem has been here since 2004. I guess the developers don’t care about usability. ——Solo Owl
*** Issue 106992 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
This is a serious issue. 6 years in the waiting...
To OpenOffice.org . My problem with your spreadsheet is your default date format of DD/MM/YYYY. I prefer to adhere to International Standard (ISO 8601) date format of YYYY-MM-DD. I have configured my Windows XP to adhere to International Standard (ISO 8601) YYYY-MM-DD for date and 24-hour HH:MM:SS for time. . True, although you allow me to change the date format, you make it very difficult for me to do so. You give me no way to override your default. I live in Canada. The old date format here WAS (in the PAST) DD/MM/YYYY. But the Standards Council of Canada has changed that by adopting the International (ISO 8601) of YYYY-MM-DD. . Your =NOW() function does not even include the following in its list of formats: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS . There would be less confusion for you and me and everybody else if everybody were to agree to a single date-format standard -- which is the reason for the existence of International Standards. However, instead of encouraging users to adhere to International ISO8601, by imposing your defaults on users, you are discouraging users from adhering to International Standards. . This comment submitted on Monday, 2010-07-05 08:49
I can't believe that nobody has fixed this. It remains my biggest irritation with Writer. My workaround is that I include a date in my preferred format at the top of my default template. Then I press Delete if my document does not need a date. Why should I need to do this? Letters are probably the biggest use for Writer. Every letter needs a date in the format required by the user. With a name like OPEN Office, why not make the default date format OPEN to the user?
Dear celglo, you are mistaken in thinking that there is only one standard. The ISO has multiple date standards, with 8601 being the most prevalent, but the ISO does not restrict the possibility of multiple standards (for example ISO has ratified both OpenDocument and OfficeOpenXML). Keeping any single standard ISO, or by location should only be a default, and as a user I should be able to use/define the standard that is appropriate to me and my needs.
How long has this been open? More than 8 years? It needs to be fixed.
Saturday June 5, 2004 There; that was easy enough to type out manually, I guess. Why should anybody care seeing the date expressed one way or another... well, except for maybe 06/05/04 ... I guess maybe that could be confusing depending on who was reading that date... assuming they'd recognize that it's a date to start with.. I suppose 06/05/04 could be looked at as meaning the 6th day of May 2004.. or June 5, 2004... or maybe even May 4 2006. Wonder why after ten years of complaining this hasn't been fixed or why it's deemed as not being persistent?
I would also like to see this for Draw since we use it to create our PDF forms and use the date as a versioning system.
*** Issue 117900 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Reset the assignee to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".