Date entry restriction of 01/01/1600

[BRIAN GODDARD]

A long time user of Star Office I have switched over this week to Open Office to specifically use Office Base in order to create a web page to allow others to access the Goddard Association family history archives and for them to enhance its content via a moderator.
This would entail them being able to complete an on screen form, however all is OK, until I ask them to enter a date which is for a time before 01/01/1600. I use the British format of dd/mm/yyyy throughout and although I can import and manipulate dates from Dbase data before this time i.e. 01/01/1600, when I try to set up these date field in

Properties:Date Field:Date Min.

, for other people to enter their data, the restriction applies. If I cannot remove this restriction, of "01/01/1600", I apparently cannot have any history, or forebears before 1600 if I am British.
Although this pre-1600 direct entry will be less than 1% of the later dates entered, it will kill the project stone dead as far as Open Office is concerned if it cannot be resolved. The majority of our users are elderly and not computer literate and displaced world wide, so the entry system must be in simple English and automatic. Can you please help?
Regards
Brian Goddard
Goddard Association of Europe

[Villeroy]

Whatever application is able to handle dates before the Gregorian reform (4th -> 15th Oct 1582) in a comprehensive and well documented manner -- use that one.
The Calc component, for instance, keeps on counting days within years of Gregorian length, including leapyears. However, certain spreadsheet functions such as Day(),Weekday(), Month() are off by the 10 days of the Gregorian reform.

[TheGurkha]

Bit more info about pre-Gregorian Dates for Excel and OOo Calc: Microsoft Excel day number.

[TheGurkha]

What you could possibly do is have a column for the day, month and the year, and have another column which holds the Julian Day number or another form of date coding. That way the date you enter in the three columns will just be plain integers and so won't fall foul of any date limits in Calc, and the Julian Day (or whatever is used) column can be used for sorting and so forth.