character formatting in multiple cells

[ChameleonScales]

In calc, if you double-click a cell and select its content, you can then go to “Format > Character” and change things like the character spacing.

However, if you get out of that cell and go back to cell selection mode, that “Character” menu item is now greyed out. So you can’t select multiple cells and apply the same character formatting to them.

Furthurmore, using the “Clone Formatting” tool doesn’t apply those specific character formats like spacing or subscript to other cells.

You can’t even copy a range of cells, paste it in Writer with RTF formatting, change the character formatting there and copy it back to Calc, as Calc will ignore the character formatting.

The only way I found to change the character spacing on multiple cells is to do it manually on each one of them.

is there no other way?

[skyhook]

If a cell is empty to start, a cheat is to copy your preferred character formatting with sacrificial content, then copy and paste special format and value. You can edit the sacrificial content with new format. Limited utility, but it does allow you to select multiple cells and apply a cell-wide character format during a paste, like modified spacing.

[erAck]

There are two types of character attribution, one applies to the entire/whole cell, and the other is in-cell formatting of individual content (rich text). What you did is in-cell formatting and that can’t be applied to contents of a multiple cell selection or other cells’ content. Only whole-cell formatting can be applied to multiple selected cells. Clone Formatting clones only whole-cell attribution.

[mikekaganski]

… and it’s likely an overlook that cell properties/styles, while contain font and font effects, don’t contain position settings, which are probably reasonable to have there? (a reason for RFE)

[erAck]

Cell properties are cell properties, so no, any “position settings” (whatever that might be) are not reasonable. In-cell rich text formatting on the other hand isn’t even applicable to another cell as soon as the cell content differs.