At 22:49 27/06/2021 +0100, David Deeks wrote:
I have discovered that I have some part-columns of figures in Calc that do not sort properly, and have identified that, unlike other numbers in the same columns, they all appear in the "input line" with a ' preceding them - whilst appearing in the body of the spreadsheet and in the "format" window without it.
Those single quote marks are not really there, in that they do not exist in the cell value. There is nothing mysterious about them: they indicate that what may look like a number is actually a text value, so 23, say, is actually the characters 2 and 3, not the number twenty-three. The quote shows in the input line to help you. Note that such text values will, by default, be left-aligned, unlike genuine numbers, which are by default right-aligned. You should be able to avoid this problem if you attend to the formatting of your cell ranges (probably columns) before you enter values and take care how you enter them.
I have extracted all the rogue ones into a separate spreadsheet in order to fiddle with them but have so far tried all different formats available without success.
No need for that. There are various ways to repair values if what you wanted was actually numbers. But here is a simple trick: o Select the appropriate cells - possibly an entire column. (You can include any genuine numbers without causing any problem.)
o Go to Data | Text to Columns... . o Leave all options as default. o OK. 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
