Trouble formatting date cells in Calc

Hello,

I have a column of dates whose cells are currently formatted as text and are shown as mm/dd/yy. I want to change them to look like yyyy-mm-dd. I select the cells in questions to change the formatting. In the “Format Cells” window I change the category to “Date” and select “1999-12-31” under “Format”. I click Ok and the date still shows as mm/dd/yy, but it has an apostrophe caracter to the left of the date. if I delete the apostrophe, the date correctly shows as yyyy-mm-dd. I would hate to have to delete the apostrophe from each cell just so that it shows the date the way I’d like. Is there a way to stop Calc from adding the apostrophe?

Thanks,

franc

Hi mariosrv. It worked. Thank you so much!

If a cell is formatted as text (@) then everything you enter in the cell is treated as text.

You can eliminate all the apostrophes in those cells:
Change the text format in the range to date format.
with Find & Replace:
Find: .*
Replace: &
In more options: mark selected range and regular expressions.
Select the range if not selected.
Replace All.

Worst hack ever that LibreOffice should fix with an actual interface, but it worked…

Also worked for me! Converted '02 Apr 2017 to 02/04/2017
Thank you @mariosv

It works, thanks!