DATEVALUE Function (OpenOffice Calc)

• Introduced: First release not established; documented by OpenOffice.org 3.3.
• Supported in: Apache OpenOffice 4.1.16; no final supported release is established.
• Scope: English desktop Calc with semicolon-separated formulas. The observed locale was English (USA), default currency USD.
• Checked: October 14, 2026. Eight ordinary examples were recalculated in 4.1.16 on Linux x86-64, Build 9816. Saved types, strings or numeric values, and both controls were checked.

DATEVALUE asks Calc’s number-format parser to recognize date text and returns the integer date serial. It accepts a parsed date or date-time category; the implementation floors the serial value, removing its fractional time part. Release implementation.

=DATEVALUE(Text)

• Text: a string that the active number-format parser recognizes as a date or date-time.

The examples use unambiguous ISO-style year-month-day strings. They establish those strings in the observed application environment, not every locale’s date grammar.

All eight formulas were recalculated. Independent references use calendar-day counts or exact seconds divided by 86400. Noninteger results are displayed to twelve decimal places; this is presentation precision, not a universal accuracy guarantee.

With the December 30, 1899 date origin used by the saved workbook, January 1, 2024 is serial 45292. February 29, 2024 is 45351, and January 1, 2025 is 45658. The difference between the two New Year serials is 366 because 2024 is a leap year.

The returned result is numeric. A cell may display that number as a calendar date when a date format is applied, but the underlying serial is still what date arithmetic uses. Do not compare a displayed string directly with a serial and assume they are the same data type.

The examples independently count days from the workbook’s stated origin. March 1, 1900 is serial 61 in that system; this is a useful reminder to identify the date system rather than relying on a bare serial imported from elsewhere.

For a date-time that the parser recognizes, the source returns floor(serial). The corresponding TIMEVALUE function selects the fractional part. That source rule is separate from the eight date-only native cases here. For programmatically assembled dates, DATE(year;month;day) avoids asking the text parser to infer a locale-dependent format.

The implementation requires the recognized format category to be date or date-time. A string recognized as an ordinary number is not accepted merely because its numeric value could be interpreted as a date serial. Invalid or ambiguous strings were not executed in this set.

Keep the active locale and date origin with any reproducibility claim. A notation such as 03/04/2024 can be ambiguous between day-first and month-first conventions; these examples intentionally avoid it. Do not use DATEVALUE as a substitute for validating the intended calendar date in an imported dataset.

DATE, TIMEVALUE, YEAR.

• Function-specific release implementation

The generated ODF was opened in the native application, hard-recalculated and saved separately. Its informational “Not all attributes could be read” load warning was retained. Both stale and uncached SUM controls refreshed correctly. The original XLSX was not executed, and this generated-ODF test does not establish manual entry or execution in another release or locale.