A twelve-year-old bug (46448 "... custom local settings for ... date and time formats") inherited
from OO -- with Importance ranked between "high" and "fatal" -- bites Calc particularly
hard (that is, harder than Writer), because there is no work-around (that I can see).
In Writer, one can select
Insert > Field > More fields... [Ctrl+F2]
and be allowed to customize a date or time format different from the default.
That capability does not exist in Calc (where [Ctrl+F2] instead calls up a menu
of functions).
In the US i18n, Calc's
Insert > Date returns a constant in default format "MM/DD/YYYY" in the
selected cell.
but Insert > Field > Date (to return a variable rather than constant) is
not even available.
The function TODAY() does return a /calculable/ (virtually variable) date (ironically in
a different default format "MM/DD/YY"). However, because they are in cells,
both the constant Date and the calculable TODAY() can be formatted to something more
useful, like ISO.
But Header and Footer fields are not in cells and cannot be given custom formats (at
least AFAICS), so selecting the Date field in Header or Footer returns the variable date,
but still in format "MM/DD/YYYY".
All of those formats are fixed by LO's internationalization choices, not
customizable (and of course not even consistent). [It just happens that the US
i8n (xx/xx/xxxx, or the even worse xx/xx/xx) is the least useful format
imaginable.]
LO's i18n is by consensus a logical mess (bug #46448 has 75 comments and 21 duplicates),
so eventually this "fatal" bug will be fixed. In the meantime, has anyone
figured out a workaround to customize the date and time fields in Calc's header and
footer?
[FTM, does anyone know why page headers and footers (or Insert > Field...) are
implemented differently in Writer and Calc (or other modules)?]
John
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