Convert human-readable column to machine readable

I have imported a CSV into LibreOffice Calc and some columns are in human-readable form (notably dates and currencies). Those are imported as text, but this way I cannot do anything useful with them, like graphing.

One columns has dates like this:

26 May 2017 13:38:11

and currency like this:

€614.00

How can I translate those into machine-readable formats?

There are a number of ways, including choosing proper import settings; using regular expressions and cell formats (along with correct locales and LibreOffice date detection settings) to change already imported data; use formulas to extract relevant information into different columns etc. It would help if you provided a link to a sample file.

The most general approach (if the string data matches what the current locale expects) is to select the data, clear direct formatting, invoke Find & Replace and for Find enter . and for Replace enter & then check that under Other options “Current selection only” and “Regular expressions” are checked.

If that happens more often to you then the most convenient approach, once installed, is the Convert Text to Number (CT2N) extension which also helps if separators don’t match your current locale.

However, to prevent the situation selecting the proper locale (that matches the data) already during the CSV import likely helps best.