[libreoffice-users] Custom date field in Calc

A twelve-year-old bug (46448 "... custom local settings for ... date and time formats") inherited from OO -- with 
Importance ranked between "high" and "fatal" -- bites Calc particularly hard (that is, harder than Writer), 
because there is no work-around (that I can see).

In Writer, one can select
         Insert > Field > More fields... [Ctrl+F2]
and be allowed to customize a date or time format different from the default. That capability does 
not exist in Calc (where [Ctrl+F2] instead calls up a menu of functions).

In the US i18n, Calc's
         Insert > Date returns a constant in default format "MM/DD/YYYY" in the selected cell.
but      Insert > Field > Date (to return a variable rather than constant) is not even available.

The function TODAY() does return a /calculable/ (virtually variable) date (ironically in a different default 
format "MM/DD/YY"). However, because they are in cells, both the constant Date and the calculable 
TODAY() can be formatted to something more useful, like ISO.

But Header and Footer fields are not in cells and cannot be given custom formats (at least AFAICS), so 
selecting the Date field in Header or Footer returns the variable date, but still in format 
"MM/DD/YYYY".

All of those formats are fixed by LO's internationalization choices, not customizable (and of 
course not even consistent). [It just happens that the US i8n (xx/xx/xxxx, or the even worse 
xx/xx/xx) is the least useful format imaginable.]

LO's i18n is by consensus a logical mess (bug #46448 has 75 comments and 21 duplicates), so eventually this 
"fatal" bug will be fixed. In the meantime, has anyone figured out a workaround to customize the 
date and time fields in Calc's header and footer?

[FTM, does anyone know why page headers and footers (or Insert > Field...) are implemented 
differently in Writer and Calc (or other modules)?]

John

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