Hello and happy new year! At last, I knew how my colleagues strongly believed and what they wanted to achieve. They wanted a date format which works across all known free, paid, old and new versions of spreadsheet program, e.g. LibreOffice Calc. They decided to use YYYY.MM.DD. and MM.DD., e.g. 2015.01.01. ---> three dots. 1st January, 2015. and 01.01. ---> two dots. 1st January. This format is standardized internally for communication. The good things are: (1) The date is stored as "text" or "string" on the computer. It is not a "number" to the computer any more. Adding or subtracting dates is disabled. It is good for just displaying the dates, which my colleagues wanted. (2) Because of (1), the date is not converted to 01/01/2015 or 2015-01-01 or 01-01-2015 as these can be default formats. Such conversion is not welcomed because the input format is different from the displayed format. The user inputs YYYY.MM.DD. and the computer displays exactly the same format. This is the consistency my colleagues were desparately looking for. (3) No additional configuration is necessary when using this YYYY.MM.DD. format. No time is spent on training staff to format a date to a certain form in a spreadsheet program. Then this is efficient. I simply sent a notice to all staff to follow the format on behalf of my boss. (4)This format is good for sorting in the spreadsheet program. It is also used in naming files. File names can be sort accordingly. (5) There is virtually a very large range of dates can be processed, e.g.
AD 1000.01.01. to AD 9999.12.31. and BC1000.01.01. to BC 9999.12.31. (if extended to YYYYY.MM.DD., the range will even be larger.) because the date is not stored as a "number" and this is not limited to the design of the software (old and new). Constrained hardware can also process many dates in this format. This YYYY.MM.DD. format is a beautiful workaround when only using it to display and sort dates. I can think of two limitations. Firstly, there is no way to add or subtract dates as easily as before. (No problem because in my case, I only display and sort the dates, not adding or subtracting.) Secondly, the file size may be a bit or much larger because the "text" or "string" is stored. (No problem because of cheap hard disks.) If your case is similar to my case, I welcome your use of this YYYY.MM.DD. format. Best wishes,C. H. D. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
