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I have two cells in OpenOffice Calc (A1 and B1). In cell A1, I have "2014/01/01" and in cell B1, I have "2014/06/03". I want to find the minimum/smallest of the values in A1 and B1. I actually have hundreds of values in column A and column B and I want to populate column C with the smallest of the two dates in column A and B.
I tried entering the following into column C1:
=MIN(A1,B1)
which I thought would produce "2014/01/01", but instead it initially produced "0". I then tried right-clicking on cell C1 and I did format cell and changed the format to "Date" which then produced "12/30/99" which is also incorrect.
I've tried googling on this question, but I haven't been able to figure out why the MIN function doesn't work with dates. Is there a different open office function that I should be using to find the smallest of two dates? Or something wrong with my MIN expression?
officeUser
Posted 2014-10-15T14:48:04.920
Reputation: 21
I don't have OpenOffice, but I tried this in LibreOffice Calc, which is a descendent. It looks like the issue might be that your dates are being interpreted as text. When I entered the dates as you show them, they were automatically reformatted to 2014-01-01 and 2014-06-03, and the min function worked. – fixer1234 – 2014-10-15T16:40:26.240
@fixer1234, the date format was the problem, when I changed the input date format from YYYY/MM/DD to MM/dd/YYYY it fixed the problem. – officeUser – 2014-10-15T16:41:52.437
For the benefit of others with the same problem, could you put your solution in the form of an answer? (You are allowed to answer your own question.) – fixer1234 – 2014-10-15T16:45:14.477