Dear Eike, m.a.risov and Christopher,

Thanks for taking your time with this.

As a programmer concerned about user experience (which sometimes I get
to practise, when not battling with spreadsheets), the userland
behaviour is pretty weird. Why is there an apostrophe in the input line
and not in the cell? That breaks all my assumptions about the
relationship between the input line and the cell. For example, if I
enter a ' into the input line, when a Text formatted cell is selected, I
get a ' in the cell. Suddenly making a ' appear in the input line
without it being in the cell is strange. Current behaviour seems like a
cheap hack to get out of doing some actual conversion logic and user
interaction. e.g.

1. Cell chars are all numerals, looks like an integer, no problem -> integer
2. Cell chars might look like a decimal number maybe with a , or a . or an E: 
ask the user what to do (locale-dependent sensible default required)
3. Function text is included (e.g. =, SUM(A1:A10), etc.) if it parses, -> no 
problem
4. Something else is there, random text, whatever. Then just apply number 
format to the cell and behave as though the user typed the same string of chars 
into the cell.

I hope that you can see that these solutions are, from a user
perspective, somewhat more appealing than the current behaviour which is
something like:

prepend a ', but only display it in the input line and not in the cell.
Don't warn the user that this has happened because of an unwillingness
to change the underlying datatype of the cell. Also don't tell them that
they have to apply an obscure, terse regex to get rid of the ' and make
the data how they want it: let them try to find it on the wiki (assumes
motivation and a working internet connection). Allow them to waste their
time working out how to reenter their data / figure out the correct
combination of copy-paste options.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1305877

Title:
  [Upstream] ' prepended when applying Number Category to Text Category
  cell with a number in it

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