Formatting: Changing Column Headers for SqlPlus Query - sqlplus

Question

I'm having trouble with two formatting issues that I would really appreciate help with:
1) The Days Open column is displaying the number of days properly, but the column name is being overwritten by my conversion command, and
2) I need the Order Date (OOpenDate) to be displayed in the "MM/DD/YYYY" format
Code:
column O_Num heading 'Order|Number' format a6
column OOpenDate heading 'Order|Date' format a10
column (sysdate-OrderOpenDate) heading 'Days|Open' format a4
select O_Num, OOpenDate, to_char(sysdate-OOpenDate, '999')
from Orders
where Status = 'Open';
What its currently displaying:
Order Order
Number Date TO_C
------ --------- ------
100 03-DEC-13 14
What I want it to display as:
Order Order Days
Number Date Open
------ --------- ------
100 12/03/2013 14
Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

The simplest approach would be to alias the "Days Open" column and apply the format mask to the alias
column days_open heading 'Days|Open' format a4;
select O_Num, OOpenDate, to_char(sysdate-OOpenDate, '999') days_open
from Orders
where Status = 'Open';
Otherwise, the column name in your column command would need to exactly match the expression in your SELECT statement (including the to_char, any spaces, etc.) That's possible but it generally makes things rather hard to maintain.