Re: Windows 10 upgrade [was: Word documents]

[Brian Barker <b....@btinternet.com>]

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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