On Sun, 05 Jul 2015 16:22:34 +0200, Steve Hayes
wrote in soc.genealogy.computing:

For example, one archival reference was MOOC 13/1/3119

Excel printed this out as 13/01/19, which would be a quite different
file in the archives filing system, and so useless as a reference.

I was using formerly Excel on my main computer and OpenOffice
on the laptop, now LibreOffice on both.

OO and LO accepted for years to enter pre-1900 dates as dates
while Excel considered them as texts. I found a method to
handle that similarly, by prepending a ' to the cell.

So enter '13/1/3119 to keep it as is. I enter all complete dates
like that, even after 1900. In a few cases, the quote is still
shown, when the date is wrong, i.. '12-31-2000 will be right
but '13-31-2000 will show the quote.


Denis

--
Denis Beauregard - généalogiste émérite (FQSG)
Les Français d'Amérique du Nord - www.francogene.com/genealogie--quebec/
French in North America before 1722 - www.francogene.com/quebec--genealogy/
Sur cédérom Ã* 1785 - On CD-ROM to 1785