Basically, I want LibreOffice Calc to do what I tell it, not what it wants.
For example:
- when I input 1.1.12, I want to have 1.1.12 in that cell, not 01.01.2012 or whatever.
- when I input 001, I want to have 001 in that cell, not 1
- and so on and so forth
I want it to never ever touch my data until I explicitly tell it to. Is that possible at all?
I know I can set format of a cell to text. It doesn't help at all. Example:
- Input 1.1.12, it gets displayed as 01.01.12, format as text, it becomes "40909", original input is lost
- Format empty cells as text. Paste "000 001 002 ..." separated by line breaks. Displays "0 1 2 ..."
I know I can write ' in front of anything for it to be forced text. Again it doesn't help, because when I paste in text, I cannot have ' auto-appended to it.
I hope this is possible. I tried googling for different problems and never found a good answer.
I understand your problem with pasting pure unformatted text. This may be more work than you like (we can try to automate that later) but when I paste data from Notepad, I am prompted with an import screen as you can see below. Select the column header(s) and then select Column type: Text. This should solve your paste/import problem. An alternative is to handle this with an AutoHotKey script.
Oh b.t.w. the @ is the format type for text, just like you have HH for 24 hour or ddd for weekdays...
If you want your input to be interpreted as text and preventing Calc to do fancy (and annoying) things with your input, you have to change the format before entering any value.
- Select the cells/columns/rows.
- Right-click 'Format Cells...'
- Select the tab 'Numbers'
- In the list 'Category', select 'Text' (the last option)
- Select the format '@' (it is the only one in this category)
- Click on 'Ok'
You may need to tweak the 'autocorrect' options as well. Go to 'Tools > Auotcorrect Options...'. Here is a link that may help: https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Deactivating_Automatic_Changes
When you are importing, you're given a bunch of options. Select "Quoted field as text" so any text inside quotes is treated as text
which is interpreted by LibreOffice as sacred and they do not modify it in the way they they modify something that they identify as number
I initially arrived at this page with a very similar (but not identical) problem. I am posting the solution here for the benefit of those who might be visiting with the same issue.
Every time I would save, close, and then re-open my .XSLX spreadsheet in OpenOffice, it would delete the spaces I had entered in between text. For example:
- "Did not attend" would become "Didnotattend".
- "John DOE" would become "JohnDOE", etc.
Specifying "text" (@) as the format (as recommended above) did not help me, unfortunately.
What ultimately did solve it was saving it as an .ODS file instead of .XSLX .
When you have your data in the clipboard click Edit -> Paste as... in main menu. In next window choose "Paste as text". All your data will be pasted as is.
just simply put character ' before the text, '0.1.16 and calc will interprate it as text data
My issue was currency, properly formatted would change to a much larger number if the numbers entered could represent a date; such as 4.22 becoming $42,482. I discovered that adding a trailing zero solved the problem.
I had pasted numbers from another site and it kept coming up with dates. I just messed around and hit the arrow that's on the paste board to give me the option of unformatted text or HTML format. I selected unformatted, a window opened to show me the text I wanted so I pressed o.k.