If you use tables in OpenOffice Writer and happen to write a date such as December 25, 2017 then expect it to turn into 12/25/17. For reasons unknown the good folks down at OpenOffice feel you don’t have a right to type a day of the year the way you want. They know best apparently! To turn off this insanely annoying feature simply choose the following from the Writer menu at the top of the page:

Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org Writer > Table > Input In Tables > Then Uncheck Number Recognition

Once this is done you are free to write dates within tables and cells as you please!