So, I have a spreadsheet with Latin vocabulary items. One column of cells had all principal parts (e.g. tendō, -ere, tetendī, tentus), which i split into two columns (tendō in once column of cells, and the remaining in another).
Then, after I had removed all the leading spaces in the (-rer, tetendī, tentus) column, I noticed this little apostrophe-like character in the formula line, which wasn’t visible in the cell itself, until I double-clicked in the cell to modify its contents.
Image attached.
What is this character, and how would I delete it?
This apostroph tells you contents are interpreted a string/text. This is more important, for phone-numbers or zip-codes wich seem numeric, but must be handled as strings, asa phone-number like 00493012345 should not be converted to 493012345 as an example.
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But the cell content is text. So, what?
Vielen Dank, Wanderer. For whatever reason, the cells were formatted as “Number”. I changed it to “Text” and the little apostrophe went away. Perhaps the default formatting is “Number” as this is a spreadsheet after all.
That’s the “formulas may start with a minus-hyphen (or plus) character” lazy data typist “feature”. In order to not start a formula when editing such text in a not-fomatted-as-text cell, a preceding ' apostrophe is added to force text when edited. It’s not part of the cell content and doesn’t harm, au contraire.
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