At 14:42 29/04/2016 +1000, Jean Lear wrote:
... I would caution anyone who upgrades to Windows 10, before doing anything else to check the Tools > Options > Language Settings > Language of Apache Open Office. (This is if they are using anything other that English (USA).) My sad experience was that Windows 10 was put onto my computer without me being aware of it. I later found that the Options I had previously set for languages, which was English (Australian) had been changed to English (USA).
If you needed to set your OpenOffice language to "English (Australia)", it may be that your original Windows installation was incorrectly set to Microsoft's default US locale and language. If you had configured Windows to Australian settings, these may have instead been inherited automatically by OpenOffice. When Windows 10 was installed, one of the first things that should have been done - if this didn't happen automatically - was to ensure that the regional and language settings in Windows itself were again set appropriately.
I'm surprised that upgrading Windows should change your OpenOffice options, but perhaps - since you say this was done without your knowledge - you will not know whether a fresh installation of OpenOffice was made or whether your OpenOffice profile was unhelpfully deleted by whoever did the job in your absence. You can easily reset the language options, of course - exactly as you describe. But the best way is to get the Windows settings right first.
This changed formatting such as dates in all my OpenOffice Calc files. When I reset the formatting in the Options all the dates became corrupted and ended up being shown as a four year and one day difference in everything. The only thing I could do then, apart from going through all the settings for OpenOffice in the Options in case anything else had been changed, was to start new files for everything I was currently wanting to use from the date I found the errors. The old files I have retained are of very little use to me now.
You are right to say that you should have been able to attend to this - very easily, I hope - in the OpenOffice options. Dates are stored as the number of days from a date origin. There are three choices for this origin - for consistency with other software - and these are provided at Tools | Options... | OpenOffice Calc | Calculate | Date. (The one-day difference between one pair is to cope with Microsoft's erroneous belief, built into Microsoft Excel and itself inherited from Lotus 1-2-3, that 1900 was a leap year and that 29 February 1900 existed. It didn't.) One pair of these options differs by exactly four years and one day, so resetting this to whatever you had previously used may have solved your problem instantly and without reconstructing your spreadsheets.
I sympathise with your predicament and don't mean to belittle your problem. Indeed, these matters are so interdependent on various settings and software versions that - despite my confident belief - I do not guarantee what I've suggested.
Brian Barker
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