At 18:39 20/03/2015 -0400, Vincent A. Juliano wrote:
I have been successful in properly entering fractions into my table.
Are we talking about a table in a text (Writer) document or material in a spreadsheet? (I suspect the answer may be the same in either case.)
Now however the fractions do not remain as I wrote them but are being reduced to the nearest single digit numerator as soon as I go to the next column to enter the next fraction.
Good-oh! That's what I'd want. If I add two cells that each contain two, I expect to see the number 4 displayed as the result, not the text string "2+2", still less "3+1" - neither of which are exactly wrong. But it's perfectly possible to store and handle such text strings if you wish - but not easily to calculate with them, of course.
what must I do to keep the fractions in their original form?
I don't think you can. If you add 1/3 and 1/6 and if you are genuinely calculating, you would surely want to see 1/2, not 3/6 or "1/3+1/6"? You probably need to decide whether you are representing these values for their appearance or as their actual value, in which latter case the simplest form would always be preferable.
o If you don't need to calculate, don't use the Fraction formatting style; instead, enter your values as Text.
o If you need to calculate but have some need for unusual formatting, you probably need to do the work yourself. There are various ways to do this.
oo You could maintain two versions of the values - one for show and one for calculation. For reliability, you should calculate one from the other, not maintain them separately. You could hide the calculation version if you preferred.
oo If the denominator was always the same, you could achieve what you ask using formatting. In the example above, you could store 2 and 1 in your cells and sum them to 3. With the cell format set to #"/6" you would see 2/6 added to 1/6 to give 3/6. (This works both in text tables and spreadsheet documents.) But if you are always working in sixths, why not indicate that at the head of the column or outside the table and keep just the numerators in that table - just as you similarly would a physical unit.?
I trust this helps. Brian Barker --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.apache.org
