Dear all,
[On this sort of subject, having done an internet search, all I can find is about calc losing conditional formatting OR Excel/Calc interactions. My ‘problem’ seems to be different!]
I have a simple Calc spreadsheet - no formatting BEYOND having a non-standard font and 3 different colours in 5 columns and about 1500 rows - colours representing the different states of items detailed in the workbook. Everything was working/OK at the start of this week but yesterday evening, on opening the file, EVERY relevant cell is now formatted as black text, no colouration present. The font type/size are as I selected them to be (I don’t use a default/standard font) but having spent (literally) years inputting and updating this data, I cannot possibly recall what every entry was what colour and I am irritated about this enforced alteration to my file, especially as there has never been any sort of problem along this lines before. All the data items are present and, bizarrely, the thumbnail picture of the file on opening LO still shows the coloured versions of entries. All the data is present - just not how I set it up to be. Hence, my posting here as I am hoping that (to part-quote Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds) minds immeasurably superior to mine will be able to help me recover all my work.
(Had posted before this simple ‘what if …’ came to my mind). It is only this workbook that has this problem - all my other formatted workbooks are working as required.
Try First Steps.
Alternatively, you can upload a reduced and anonymized copy of your file, in which the problem is present, here. Someone can then examine the file.
On this occasion, please specify your operating system and LibreOffice version. Thank you.
Some accessibility settings will hide coloring on screen. However, this should affect all spreadsheets. May still be worth checking:
- Menu item
Tools - Options - In left pane select
LibreOffice - Accessibility - Untick all options in the
High contrastsection
To indicate state, it is often better to use cell content instead of directly applied formatting. Either a leading “status character” in the entry (for text entries), or an adjacent cell with state info. With that, it is a lot easier to summarise (e.g. to indicate that there are entries in “critical state”, or to count entries in “active state”). That state indicator may be used as a source for conditional formatting, e.g. to apply your coloring of choice for visibility.
Well done to Keme1, whose sequence of actions has fixed the problem ! (Award yourself a pay rise for this)
One of the other observations I had, prior to this solution, was that if I selected any cell and edited any of the text therein, the relevant colour re-appeared but coming away from that cell had it re-forced “back to black” (to reference an Amy Winehouse song). (And just to clarify, when I spoke about the “state” of an entry item, “status” may well have been a better choice of word - ie the cell content display colours represented whether I had achieved Action 1, Action 1+2 or Action 1+2+3 - nothing to do with machine states or anything more complex. The offered solution by EarnestAl had no affect on the cell format displays but thanks for the suggestion. Many thanks for the help folks.