I have tried many different options and LibreCalc is determined to autofill the date a certain way. All I want to do is to enter the date as MM/DD. The closest I can get is being able to enter the date as MM/DD but if I go back and double click on the cell containing only MM/DD data it will be autofilled to MM/DD/YYYY. I am at wits end trying to understand why it is so difficult to just enter the data I want. I have unchecked AutoInput but that has zero effect on my situation. It is very frustrating to have a program insisting on entering data I do not want nor need. I have spent too much time searching for an answer to this basic function and can only conclude that this is either a bug or a massive oversight. The user should be able to enter simple text data without interference from the program.
A few digits with a slash between aren’t a date. There is no date without an information about the year. School children should be trained to read such a string as a fraction, and using it in a formula it will be interpreted this way.
Nonethless spreadsheets are trimmed to “recognize” such hokum as dates. If an entry is treated this way depends on the locale settings of the user and in addition on what was possibly entered to the options under “Date acceptance patterns”. Such an entry is then converted to the numeric standard representation of a date based on the chosen NullDate (mostly 1899-12-30) and displayed in the default “date format” regarding the chosen language settings which often again is a crippled string.
If you insist on entering something like 5/6 as a plain string, set the NumberFormat code for the respective cells to @ (“Text”).
You shouldn’t call it a date even then, because (among additional reasons) it may as well be interpreted as the “fifth day of june” (USA) or the “sixth day of may” (everywhere else in the English speaking world) or not at all by users knowing the dangers.
Of course you can’t autofill something not being a date in date mode.
(In the original question “autofill” was supposedly used for “autoformat” or similar.)
As in many cases there also is a “workaround” roughly resulting in a behaviour the questioner seems to prefer.
I won’t describe one resulting in this kind of extremely misleading (ambivalent) sheets.
If somebody els does it, I can’t help.
My actual recommendation for English speaking users of recent LibreOffice is to set the locale to English (Canada). The default date format should then be YYYY-MM-DD (ISO 8601)
Canadians seem to know best what a mess can be made of dates if USA standard format must be accepted.
I appreciate the reply and further clarification. I do disagree with the notion that “a few digits with a slash between aren’t a date”. Since I am creating content exclusively for myself I only wish to provide relevant data and when I read 10/03 or 11/01 I know exactly what that means and/or refers to. It is absurd to think that a few digits separated by a slash should have only one meaning. I still insist that it’s a foolish bit of programming to disallow the end-user from entering data in a way that is more meaningful and concise to them. I understand the program has its own ideas of what I’m doing, but usually there is a way to make the program behave as needed. It seems that I would be better off using Libre Writer where I can actually control the data.
Maybe true for now and the next months, but imagine you open this old-file 3 or 5 years later will you be able to remember the year to which this partial date belongs?
Either pre-format the cell as Text (@ number format) prior to entering data, or precede the input with an ' apostrophe to force it to text content, e.g. '05/06 The apostrophe will not be part of data, unless you entered that into a cell that was pre-formatted as Text. Note that the result of course will not be a date that you could calculate with, just a text string, as you wished.