How can I autocomplete today's date in Writer?

[Spellflower]

In Microsoft Word, when I type the name of the current month, autocomplete suggests the complete date. For example, today is March 6, 2020, so if I open Word and type “March” followed by a space, it suggests, “March 6, 2020” and all I have to do is press enter to have this appear.

This method does not work in LibreOffice Writer, but I have discovered that if I type “202” that it will autocomplete “2020-03-06”.

Is there a way that I can get autocomplete to insert today’s date in the format I used in Word?

Thanks!

[Spellflower]

I did some more searching, and learned that I can insert the current date by using Insert, Field, More Fields, Date, Date Fixed, December 31, 1999. But doing this takes much longer than simply typing the date.

I read that the shortcut Ctrl + ; should insert the date, but it does nothing.

Could this be solved with a macro? How would I do that?

[ajlittoz]

In my LO 6.3.4.2; shortcut Ctrl+; is not associated with any action. If you want this shortcut to insert date, Tools>Customize, Keyboard tab.

In Category, select Insert, in Function Date, click on the desired key combination in the upper list and push Modify.

By default the field is formatted according to your locale but this can be changed.

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[Spellflower]

Thanks so much, ajlittoz! That’s just what I needed.

[ajlittoz]

@Spellflower: so, why did you remove the green mark?

[Spellflower]

Sorry, user error!

[Spellflower]

I’m now working from home, using LO for Mac, and I can’t seem to get this to work. I followed all the instructions as before, and successfully set ^D as “insert date”, but it doesn’t do anything when I return to my document.

[Spellflower]

Weird- it just started working, after I tried to do it manually using Insert → Field → Date. My shortcut key combo (^D) appeared next to “date” and when I tried it it worked, though it wouldn’t before.

[Lupp]

Yes, you can insert Date/Time/DateTime text fields and you can define (hopefully in a reasonable way) the number format to use …
To facilitate this as a frequently occurring action you can define the field as an AutoText item (including the formatting) under a name and with a shortcut. If you later type this shortcut and subsequently hit F3 the defined autotext is inserted.

Read the help for AutoText and probably the explanations by “Villeroy” in this thread thread in a different forum for more details. But, please, stick to reasonable formats (ISO 8601).

(I can also provide macros, but in fact I made them more as a kind of poetry than for everyday use.)
If you come to the very laudable decision to reformat all the badly formatted date/time fields in existing documents to the actual standard, I would be glad to provide macros for the task. This cannot be done with the help of AutoText.