[Solved] Date format confusion

[bluegroper]

I like to insert Date (fixed) in all my documents.
So I'm using Insert, Field, Other (Ctrl-F2) quite often.
In some documents the date format displays as :
Friday, 31 December 1999
In some other documents, the date format displays as :
Friday, December 31, 1999
[Bold above added for clarity.]
What is causing this inconsistency in my OO ?
How can I force OO to always use
Friday, 31 December 1999
Thanks for any tips or clues.

[Zizi64]

The date VALUES are numbers in most of office suites. They are numbers in the Spreadsheet applications and in the Text editors. The human view of the dates are strings.
You can format of the dates as you want, and the default formatting depends on setting of the locale of the
- office suite (user interface)
- the language setting of the document (or the language of a part of the document: for example a paragraph)

Check the language settings of the paragraph (paragraph style) in your document. Or use an customized paragraph style, like I had used in this sample:

Locale date formats.odt

(11.72 KiB) Downloaded 85 times

[bluegroper]

Thanks. That helps me a lot.

[bluegroper]

Uncheck View, Field Names (Ctrl+F9) is also relevant to this issue.

Posted here for completeness, in case it helps somebody else (or myself) sometime later.

[Villeroy]

- the language setting of the document (or the language of a part of the document: for example a paragraph)

this handles the human language of a paragraph, auto-correction and spell checking. It has nothing to do with the numbers.

Numeric locale settings:
1. Tools>Options>LangSettings>Languages>Locale
2. Calc has a default style for spreadsheet cells where the locale setting can be set in the context of the number format. Cell style "Default" affects the whole spreadsheet document.
3. Writer has no cell styles for its text tables. You have to turn on number recognition and apply hard formatted locale setting and number formats to selected groups of table cells.
Writer's date fields have an automatic locale according to 1. You can change it when you double-click the field, choose "Additional formats..." and use the normal number format dialog with language.
Every number format depends on the locale but not vice versa. When you change the locale of some element, you may have to redefine the format code too.
Number format language "Default -- English(USA)" means that the US number format is taken from the global setting in 1. The appearance (not the value) may change when you switch to another global locale.