Whenever I enter a date in a spreadsheet it defaults to a two digit year eg. 24/06/21
I know I can format the cells to display the four digit year eg 24/06/2021
I would like to set things so that the four digit year is the default for all my Calc sheets and workbooks. How do I do that?
Not at all. Each locale has its own default date format after you have entered a valid date and LibreOffice has correctly recognized the date as such (which seems to be DD/MM/YY in your locale) and you cannot change that globally (besides creating a template having a locale whose default would be DD/MM/YYYY - but I’m pretty sure you don’t want a locale like “Friulian”, which seems to have this default ;-)). In other words: There no such thing like a “template of default format for each data type” (which would be a great thing, if it could be implement - my opinion)
That’s a great pity and, in my opinion, a significant omission from the options available. Even my MS Excel has that available.
Having been reminded this morning of the DATEDIF function (apparently undocumented) being available in MS Excel, I was pleased to see that LibreOffice Calc also has it.
If Calc can cater for around 600,000 inhabitants of Italy, surely it ought to be able to cater for a significant portion of the English speaking world - a development for future versions maybe.
You seem to not get the message: If anyone from “Friul”, using “Friulian” default, wants to have DD/MM/YY - he can’t do that. His/Her restriction is, that he/she needs to stick with DD/MM/YYYY and manually format, if he/she wants to use something else than their default. Friulian people will be in the same situation. He/She has also one default for the format, which can’t be changed globally as well. So this absolutely got nothing to do with neglecting a significant portion of the English speaking world, but history, tradition and standards defined (sometimes) by national bureaus of standards.
I got the message OK: I just find it surprising that an application with options to set or change a wealth of oddball defaults that I would guess most users never even consider does not have the facility to configure a simple date format. This is my first foray into the ‘AskLibO’ arena, so please excuse my assumption that folks with some influence on the development path might be involved and offering advice. I am relatively new to LibreOffice spreadsheet having migrated from IBM Symphony: an interesting move which makes me think that the development team might have come that way too. I am, no doubt, one of many who have moved over the years from Visicalc, through Framework, Lotus 123, Smart, and Excel with the likes of Improv to end up using Calc. They all have their quirks, specialities and difficulties, but they are all, at heart, enormous areas of accounting paper. Thank you for your responses and help which I bet you will be able to give in the future.