When I open the file I need to work on, LO Calc 3.3.4 automatically interprets some cells as date and changes their values.
For example the cell content ‘4-6’ gets converted to ‘06-Apr’. If I then change its format to text it becomes ‘41005’.
I tried different options, Expand Formatting,language separator, etc without any luck.
I can’t put a ’ in front of the content because by the time I can edit the file is already changed.
How can I get LO to respect the value ‘4-6’ as is?
File is xlsx
What kind of file are you opening?. It is a native .ods file?
Hi @Henry,
Still looking for an answer here?
You mentioned using LO 3.3.4. We’ve now released LO 4.0 – could you try with the latest release and let us know if you’re still experiencing the same problems?
Thanks!
A trick I have used in Excel and I suspect would also work in Calc is to select the cell (or, in my case, highlight the whole column by clicking on the column heading), and then going into “Format” → “Format Cells” (or Ctl+1 which is CTL + the digit 1), scrolling down the “Category” column, and clicking on text. That way, what is entered in that cell is interpreted as text, not as a date, not as a number, but as text.
Of course, this requires that the file would then subsequently be saved with the cell formatted as a category of “Text”.
If this doesn’t help, please explain in more detail what you are doing. Are you opening a non-LibreOffice file and allowing it to convert, or opening a .CSV file (and does it include quotes around the text of text columns?), or are you doing something else?