Turn Off auto-date correction

[Villeroy]

Same "problem" with non-users since 1980. A cell value is a number or text. Whatever border, font, color, underlining or number format you apply to that cell, it will not (and it must not) change your cell value. It is a matter of data integrity that no formatting attribute has any influence on the actual data. Every good beginners book of MS Excel describes this matter.

AGAIN AND AGAIN AND ONCE MORE:
There are two ways to suppress spreadshet evaluation:
1. leading apostrophe
2. text formatting before data entry.

Once you have wrong / unwanted text data in your sheet, you have to re-enter or re-paste or re-import data. There are several methods which do this semi-automatically BUT NOT FULLY AUTOMATICALLY for very good reasons.

AND AGAIN:
You are free to install LibreOffice which makes it rather difficult to enter any dates because it is has been adjusted to meet the requirements of non-users. You will notice the difference when you have to import/paste/enter lots of dates.

[theYannis]

actually there are three kinds of values, dates/time, numbers and text
text to number switching has no effect on actual value if you change them either way.

toggling either of those with dates, messes things up (i tried all combinations to test my point)

you are actually right on the "since 1980" part (i checked on MS excel 2000), and I understand that with the term "non-users" you refer to all the other users of the world beside the ones that need the date-feature not only by default, but without on-off availability.

I understand that you fail to acknoledge that there are actually lots of other features in spreadsheets, that make those programs ideal to the other users because of their versatility (besides the date incovenience). You just want a program for you and only for you (your need VS my need)

As for my opinion that the auto-date feature is very useful, but not as useful as the option to turn it off (even if the default installation has it on).
making the feature go on and off is not hard to code. it is similar to auto-complete etc. they actually have on and off.

I understand that you will come back with another comment of the sort: it is the way it is, it is explained on the manual and there is a group of users that could disable it by mistake and the end of the world will come, so that is the reason there is no on-off.

I guess we will have to wait some developer to write those two lines of code, as microsoft did when she forgot start menu for Windows 8 and put it back there in 10 when the need was there.

[Lupp]

Actually there are three kinds of values, dates/time, numbers and text.

Unfortunately this is not correct. What pretends to be a date by format (or a "percentage" or a Boolean) is simply a number on the technical level. The value of a cell keeping a date in your eyes actually is just the number of days counted from 1899-12-31 being day number 1 (for a bad historical reason).

Things are worse concerning Booleans and "percentages" . And the worst thing I consider the fact that even the specifications are talking of types in an improper way.
Fortunately the only function sensitive to that bad pseudotype concept is ISLOGICAl. Nonetheles it is capable of causing lots of serious errors.

[Villeroy]

Databases have many different data types. Calc spreadsheets have only two, Excel three types. All spreadsheets dates are formatted day numbers.

Format 0 as a date and you see 1899-12-30 which is point zero of the time scale.
Day 40000 was 2009-07-06 and when you calculate the difference between two date values, you actually calculate the difference between two day numbers.
Try this:
=DATE(2009;07;06)=40000 => TRUE [the "date value" is the same as 40000]
=WEEKDAY(40000) => 2 [because 2009-07-06 was a Monday]
=YEAR(40000) => 2009 [year portion±
=MONTH(40000) => 7 [month portion]
=DAY(40000) => 6 [day portion]

=WEEKDAY(0) => 7 [because day #0 1899-12-30 was a Saturday]
=YEAR(0) => 1899 [year portion±
=MONTH(40000) => 12 [month portion]
=DAY(40000) => 30 [day portion]

Times are fractions of day.
0.5 => 1899-12-30 12:00
0.75 => 1899-12-30 6pm
40000.25 => 2009-07-06 6am

[Villeroy]

input 12-10, Calc gives 12/10/2017, change format to text and it is not returned to 12-10, but 43020.

12/10/2017 is just another method to enter the cell value 43020. Number format text does not apply to numbers so the cell values is dispayed as a plain, unformatted number.
Format the date as number and you see 43020.
Format the number as date and you see 2017-10-12 (or any other variant of date format which does not matter as long as the cell number refers to this year's 12th day in October).

Format 43020 with format code WW and you see 41 because 2017-10-12 is in the 41th week
Format 43020 with format code DDDD and you see "Thursday" because 2017-10-12 is a Thursday
But the true cell value remains 43020
[the above format codes assume English number format locale. you can set the locale for individual cells in the number format dialog]

[Villeroy]

Dates in Excel and how to convert text to numbers by means of formulas:
https://fiveminutelessons.com/learn-mic ... date-excel

This is pretty much the same as in Calc and older Excel verisions of the 90ies but Calc provides 2 additional options which allow you to do the conversion in place:
Call Tools>Options>LanguageSettings>Languages and adjust the "Locale" setting to the language of your text data (e.g. US English for M/D/Y dates, German for point separated D.M.Y dates). The locale setting is also crucial when you convert by means of formulas. With a wrong locale the conversion fails completely or you get wrong values.
1. Select the cells in question, apply any number format that is not "Text" and call Data>Text To Columns..., uncheck all delimiters and confirm the dialog.
2. Call Edit>Find&Replace... with extra options "Regular Expressions" and "Current Selection"
Search for .+ (dot and plus), replace with & and hit [Replace All]

After you converted all strings to correct numbers, you can switch back to your preferred locale setting. It sets the evaluation context for type conversions without changing existing values.

[marwerno]

Just for users that have this issue as well:
Interesting post here:
http://erack.org/blog/archives/8-LibreO ... terns.html
And for date input you can simply set it in the options menue (I am on Libre Office 5.2 right now)
Tools -> Options -> Language settings -> Languages:
There you find "Date acceptance patterns" where you can set which input types you want to have accepted as dates and which not (You can't clear it to have no auto formatting of cells to dates. Just set a style which does not conflict with your data entry. "Unfortunately" it still seems to auto format on ISO styles. (And ironically, it does not have ISO styles on automatic fields in draw at least)

[Villeroy]

"Date acceptance patterns" make things more complicated than necessary.
You never know which features obey them in Writer, Calc, Base and the Basic IDE. Base and Basic know nothing about these patterns. Calc's text import ignores them too.
When you switch to another locale temporarily, LO resets the patterns which makes no sense.
When trying to help someone on this forum, this is another brick in the wall of misunderstanding (just like the confusion about comma/semicolon as list separators).

All spreadsheets I know (AOO Calc, Excel and Gnumeric) accept ISO Y-M-D, and digits with slashes plus some locale dependent variants. If you don't want that, all 3 applications provide 2 well known methods for text entry.

[Zizi64]

All this to just admit that there is no simple way to turnoff the auto date correction.

There is not any "date correction" feature in the AOO/LO Calc application.

There is "date/number recognition" feature.
If you could turn it off, then the entered "date-like strings, number-like strings" would stay in text format with zero value, but they would be not converted to formatted numeric values, they still pure strings.
You can achieve this state by formatting the cells as "text" before you enter the "date-like strings".

BeeRayDee , you must understand some basic principles:
All of the entered data are strings first time when you enter them into a cell.
a - is a character with zero value
b b b - are five characters (two spaces between the letters)
5 - is a character with zero value
5.321 - are five characters with zero value (included an English decimal separator character)
5,321 - are five characters with zero value (included a German/Hungarian decimal separator.)
2020-03-02 - are ten characters and nothing more.

The Calc and all of other spreadsheets softwares will try to recognize these strings if they represent some numeric value or not. And then Calc (with English locale settings) will convert the "5" "5.321", "2020-03-02" strings to a numeric value, but it will show the converted numeric value as the formatting properties determine it - by default (in accordance with the locale settings), or by the wish of the user (in accordance with individual formatting or style properties).

If you format a cell as "TEXT" - before entering the cell content - the Calc will not use the number recognition feature.
The Calc - with Hungarian locale settings - will not recognize the 5.321 as a number, but it will recognize the 5,321 as a number!

And there are patterns for the dates for the various locales "01. 03. 2020" "03. 01. 20" that gives you a chance to recognize the date strings entered in various locale rules.

The "YYYY-MM-DD" is an International Standard format for clear dates: ISO 8601
https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
(The general Hungarian rules for date/time values has same oder - since long times.)