I have a table in Writer that I am using for recording inventory information. When I enter .177 in a cell, it keeps changing it to 0.18 which is not what I want. If I were using Calc I would format the column as text, but I don’t see how to do that in Writer.
menu Table > Number Format…
I tried that–as soon as I tab out of the cell, it changes.
Standard format for table cells is ‘Text’. If you put that to decimal number without further modification, you’ll see the effect of rounding to two decimal places. Increase the number of decimal places or switch back to Text.
Yes, the standard format is ‘Text’. In my table, the format for that specific cell is also ‘Text’. Regardless of all that, it reformats the number (that I would be just as happy to have treated as ‘Text’) as if the cell format were numeric with two decimal places and the leading zero. If I add some text along with the number it doesn’t happen, but there isn’t any text that applies to this particular number so anything I might add would be deceptive with my content. In Calc, I could format the cell as ‘Text’ and it would behave as I want, or I could enter '.177 (with the leading single quote) and it would again behave as I want. Isn’t there some way to force Writer to treat the number as Text?
You did not write, which version of LO you are using. Maybe there is a difference in behaviour. For me it’s 6.2.2.2 on Win 10 / 6.0.7.3 on Ubuntu 18.04.5 But with both I don’t face the effect you describe. Conclusion: you may activated an option that performes an autodetect with the table content. E.g. in menu table there is an option ‘AutoFormat’. Or you modified the concerning document styles. But I’m almost newbie to LO and don’t have a real clue where you could take a look into.