I want to change the formatting to imperial from metric. How do I do that?
Please delete all duplicates of this question. Thanks in advance …
You need to be much more precise.
There are some related settings for the user interface. But. assuming you have set your interface and your locale to en(USA), these should be by default as you like them.
If the question is about numeric contents or results in spreadsheet cells you need to convert them explicitly. It is not a question of formatting.
Some of the suggestions have not noticed that you about setting from Imperial to Metric, and may not have guessed your country correctly. When those of us outside the UK or US start up LibreOffice, it seems to use our default keyboard to set the units to Imperial. You can change this by refining the language preferences using Tools>Options>Language Settings>Languages which seems to fix the units and default spelling
It is not uncommon for Windows computers sold in new Zealand and Australia to be set to US.
Make sure to go into language and country settings in Windows and set locale to New Zealand, language to New Zealand Aotearoa, keyboard to US
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Have you noticed the age of the thread?
The thread-opening person was not “seen” here for 5 years, so I guess any discussion is moot.
You’re right. Weirdly, it came up when I was searching for changing from imperial to metric. Does the same trick work though?
It’s a catch-22. Do you annoy people by starting a new question line, or do you contribute an answer where none has been provided for others who like me are searching anew
Starting a new question on a site dedicated to asking questions is not annoying people. On the other hand, it may be reasonable to contribute to an existing thread - if you see that your contribution would make it much better, specifically - better than a potential new question with a good description and not cluttered by “irrelevant” stuff.
In your comment, just the same as in the original question, it’s completely unclear what you want - it may be “I want the whole app to be in some specific system” (usually done by changing the app locale); or “I need come cell to show in some specific system”; or “I need some file to use a specific system when importing”, …
Thanks. It’s quite difficult to know what to do when you have a question that doesn’t seem to have been answered. Not all new users know all the ways that something might not be working, so it’s quite hard to guess the right question. I should however have detected that there’s a pretty prickly response to people fumbling with asking questions; that tends to be a cultural thing that varies across different boards. Some are friendly, some not so much
So step by step for LibreOffice:
- Click Tools > Options > Languages and Locales > General
- Set User interface to *English (UK)
- Set Locale setting to English (New Zealand). This will give you metric, etc.
- Under Default language for Documents > Western set English (New Zealand) or English (UK), either doesn’t matter as the spellings are the same but you get many AutoCorrect entries pre-filled with English (UK) as opposed to none with NZ. You may also choose a different language, it won’t affect the Locale setting.
True. But while it may be difficult to use “perfect” wording, it is always possible to explain it in layman terms: “when I open the program, I see this and this; pressing here, that happens; I need these things instead, here are screenshots, possibly even with handwritten notes…”
Just as a generic advice to creation of good reports 
how do you change from metric to imperial?
You don’t. It’s the other way around. The use of imperial measures must be abandoned. Now!
On a more serious note:
how do you convert measures from metric to imperial?
That depends on the measure. You can multiply/divide a certain coefficient, or use the convert_add function.
I want to change the formatting …
That makes sense.
There is no builtin formatting for all the subdividing units in imperial measures, so if you want e.g. to lay out a number of pounds in stone/lb/oz/pwt, you have to calculate the individual numbers yourself and put them together to a display value. Generally, you do this by taking the integer quotient and continue calculating on the remainder.
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