Openoffice-calc can't change the date format of a column

Question

In openoffice calc I open a csv file downloaded from the internet.

One of the columns is for date. The date is in format dd/mm/yy. It is also aligned left (which I think it is saved as text).

I want to modify the date format to yyyy-mm-dd so i can fit it in a mysql table that i have created and in which i hava a column with data type date (so it requires the format i mentioned before).

So I select the column 'Date' in openoffice calc and try to change the format from what it is to the one i want. Nothing is happening. No changes at all.

Any suggestion? Has anything to do with character set or anything like that?

Answer 1

If you select one cell and look at the cell contents in the top 'formula' box - does it start with a single quote ? That means, it is imported as text. Try remove the quote, and the date suddenly behaves as a date (and uses your display preferences for that cell).

There is a funny hack to remove these leading quotes using search and replace. Select your column, do a search and replace, click more options, current selection only, use regular expressions :

search ^(.*)$
replace &

in regexp speak, this means search anything and replace it by itself . in OO, this removes the leading quote.

Answer 2

You could just use MySQL's STR_TO_DATE() function:

LOAD DATA INFILE '/path/to/file.csv'
  INTO TABLE my_table
  CHARACTER SET utf8
  FIELDS
    TERMINATED BY ','
    OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"'
  LINES
    TERMINATED BY '\r\n'
  IGNORE 1 LINES
  (@date, col_a, col_b, etc)
SET
  date_col = STR_TO_DATE(@date, '%d/%m/%Y')
;

Answer 3

它在导入/打开对话框中，您必须告诉它这些列是一个日期，然后一切正常。