Formatting OpenOffice spreadsheet cells with DD/MM/YY

Things don't always work the way you expect. However, it's easy to make things work the right way with spreadsheet cells once you know how it works.

Let's say you want the day first, so that 12/1/10 is January 12th, not December 1st. You do this under Format > Cells. However, if you just change the format to DD/MM/YY manually, you might get some unexpected results. It's usually better to just switch the country/language for those cells.

Here's why. We'll start out "normal" with standard American English formatting, MM/DD/YY.

And now I switch the format code to DD/MM/YY manually...

But now when I type a new date into a cell I've formatted that way....

So switch the language to one that uses the date format you want. Then what you type stays in the same order.