Remember, that anything that begins as a number, Calc tries to interpret
as a number rather than text. For most users, this is exactly what you
want most of the time. For a few unlucky people (like you), their
average use case is different than others, and you do not want that. It
is odd that you can turn this stuff off in a text table, but I am unsure
how to do so in a Calc document unless........
Read this, it will give you some ideas.
http://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=57276
Sounds like setting the default style to be text will solve your
problems; maybe.
On 01/06/2013 11:56 PM, kieth lovell wrote:
My name is kiet lovell,
I am an serial small scale entrepeneur, and I like to do my business plans (as
well as everything else) in spreadsheets.
For years I have suffered as
1. numbers are turned to dates
2. phone numbers are altered
3. lower case data is changed to identical higher case data (eg: data
to DATA(when DATA is a separate piece of data that i typed than the lower case))
4. If I type Scone then i can not write s, sc, sco, or scon in the same
field without my data being altered to the full word scone.
There is no solution to this in the options for calc.
Please do not reference selecting every cell as text or another type of data as
it only stops certain types of alterations.
What needs to be done is that there needs to be an option to turn off all
autodata transformations.
It should be in tools>options>openoffice.org calc>general>input settings
Thank you in advance
Kiet Lovell
The important part of the message is the piece above, the following are just my
views/or justifications.
I am sending this to the development mailing group as this issue has been
complained about by at least hundreds of users for several years without
solution.
If you do not think it is a big problem then please google any of the following
phrases:
Office keeps changing numbers to dates
Turn off autodata in calc
Prevent openoffice changing my data
etc.
I have spent weeks of my life trying to fix this problem to no avail.
The only way i can use calc is to change the data such as putting letters with
phone numbers and when unable to input the correct data, by inputting slightly
wrong data so that it isn't changed to a different value.
Almost all users of calc use it for home finance or education or business
purposes, and all of these can be badly affected by unsanctioned changes to
data.
Microsoft office in it's latest reincarnation is unusable for a professional
and libre office has the same problem as openoffice.
If you the developers of open office cannot fix this then i will either:
* continue to suffer in relative silence
or less likely
* spend 6 months learning to program and produce my own software that i
will charge for.
or probably
* downgrade to an efficient OS like windows 3.1 when computers were
made for saving time and money, not costing you it
--
Andrew Pitonyak
My Macro Document: http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.odt
Info: http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php
