As with every other spreadsheet software in the world, you can change the way Google Sheets interprets cells. It is set for 'Automatic' by default, but I've just changed the cells to 'Plain Text' by going to Format -> Number -> Plain Text. I've always assumed everyone knew you could change how cells were formatted, but pass that on for those of you who don't seem to. Best wishes, James On 03/09/16 22:16, Kevin Hawkins wrote:
I had a similar problem years ago. As I recall, Google Sheets interprets dates entered based on the locale of the user, not of who created the sheet. It's certainly a problem when collaborating across locales.
On 9/3/16 8:13 AM, Syd Bauman wrote:
I used Chromium Web Browser on Ubuntu to edit our spreadsheet of arrivals and departures: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lfA50neSm_2tnX0qQj1vw9MhM3fgjN7WVOhf...
I wrote "Sat 09-24 10:10" into column B, and "Sat 10-01 10:25" into column C. In column B what I wrote was entered. In column C what I wrote was interpreted as a date and entered as "10/01/2016 10:25:00". However, it is displayed as "Sun 10-01 10:25". I'm betting this is because the date is interpreted as a European format date: January 10th was, in fact, a Sunday.
Furthermore, the string displayed in C was right-justified until I over-rode that with explicit formatting.
I'm guessing that "09-24" was not thought of as a date because "24" is not a possible month. I'm wondering if Google *always* thinks of dates as DD[sep]MM, or it does that because a European initiated this spreadsheet? (Who initiated this spreadsheet?)
Anyway, I've inserted some words to prevent Google Sheets from thinking of these as dates.
-- Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings@it.ox.ac.uk Academic IT Services, University of Oxford