I am trying to sort dates in a column of data. The filter does not seem to recognize date format and sorts the data by a criteria that I cannot understand. I have changed the cell format to date yet it mixes years 20/21/and 22 ? Any suggestions please
Many users are having difficulty in sorting date with libre office calc. Spent hours looking up libre office sites because I am using english dates. This is a major problem which I suggest libre office needs to provide a clear solution. One suggestion buried deep in the comments says “tick special characters” which when ticked imports dates correctly. As excel does the import without any issues (I dont subscribe to it now due to cost) I am wondering why Libre office has a lot of difficulty with it.?
Not in New Zealand where it frequently ignored local settings and would randomly assign US format to some dates only, left some in NZ format and some as text. By assigning US format (MDY) to NZ dates (DMY) it changed the actual data in some rows. Maybe it is better now? It was a major driver for abandoning Excel for me.
Seems unlikely, dates aren’t special. Better to specify the actual date format of the column in original csv in the Text Import. The Help button is useful.
Of course, it would work much better if everyone used ISO Format, YYYY-MM-DD
Every software product has exactly the same issues when importing non-standardized csv.
Once set, the setting is persistent.
But YOU have to decide if 2/3/2025 means second of March (English) or third of February (US-English).
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The problem is: There are a bunch different charsets and date-formats used for csv, and it is not documented in the file. So you need an educated guess of the format (unless you live in the little area around Microsoft, where everything is adjusted for Excel.).
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In the archives of my company you find still .csv.txt-files designed only to keep Excel from doing false imports of this csv-files. The advantage of OpenOffice was: It asked for the right parameters (while Excel used its own defaults, wich didn’t fit - starting with “insisting” on , instead of ; )