I used to be able to enter a date in the format MM/DD and it would be recognized as a date, and as such formatted to whatever the date format set for that cell had been set to (for example, YYYY-MM-DD). (eg) I would enter 10/1, hit enter, and the cell (having a DATE format) would change it to 2013-10-1
Now, however, it just leaves it as text instead of converting it to a date. Very frustrating. How can I change this behaviour to what it used to be / what I want?
This is probably related to the language settings. If the cells are formatted for a language that doesn’t use / as a separator then Calc will assume it is text.
You can check the language for a cell in Format > Cells > Numbers tab, on the top right corner.
Example: my Language is set by Default to Portuguese and the Portuguese date separator is a hyphen - instead of a slash /
So typing 1-10 will display a date but 1/10 will be formatted as text.
Hope this helps!
The language is set to “Default - English (Canada)”.
Using “-” instead of “/” makes no difference (ie, entering “1-10”); the input is still not converted to a date, but stays as text.
Can you confirm whether or not the date format MM/DD exists in your version of Calc? Right click in an empty (virgin) cell and select ‘Format Cells’ and scan through the Numbers tab entries for it…
@samandiriel, I can confirm that formatting a cell as English (Canada) does cause that problem. It is indeed a bug and since it used to work, it is also a regression. I loaded a few versions back and found out that the last version that worked as expected is 3.5.7
You can get an “old” installer from Index of /libreoffice/old
It would be great if you could report this bug at
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=LibreOffice
Hope this helps 
Poop. Thanks for all your work in tracking down the last working version. Bug filed at https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71664
I am currently using version 5.0.3.2 of LibreOffice and this issue has not been resolved yet. My language settings are what they should be, but calc does not accept DD/MM/YY input for dates. Because the / is in many lap-top keyboard settings on a very handy place for this function - a lot handier than the “-”, which is next to the numbers you have to type in anyway - I do miss this feature badly.