Hello everyone, I have a column with dates formatted like MM/DD/YYYY and I want to convert in DD/MM/YYYY, I select the whole data, right click, format cells, numbers and I type DD/MM/YYYY, and nothing happens.
Any help on how to solve this? Thank’s
The typical cause is your “data” not being imported/recognized as date, so actually be text. And text does not react to formatting as date…
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/Calc/How_to_convert_number_text_to_numeric_data
You imported text data wrongly. Your dates are text, sequences of digits and slashes. Number formats do not apply to text.
When importing M/D/Y dates, choose English(USA) as import language because that is the right dialect for M/D/Y dates and tik “Detect special numbers”.
The only reliable, technically unmistakable, human-readable, and globally understood date format is ISO 8601 extended: YYYY-MM-DD. It was developed by clever people charged with the job. In addition it’s understood and correctly interpreted as dates by spreadsheets. You can even keep such dates as texts and nevertheless use them in calculations.
Why replace one silly “traditional” format with another one?
Because I do not create the data I work with, they come from different providers and they choose what they want.
My (rhetoric) question was’t why you get the dates in a bad (the worst one known) format, but for what reason you want to change them to another bad format instead of using the good one.
It’s just a habit of mine, anyway I’ll follow your suggestion. Thank’s