Clone Formatting of a cell format does not work in Calc. I am using LO 7.1.6.2 (x64) in Windows 10 Home, ver 21H2. Is Java required for this function?
Java is not required (in fact is not required for almost anything, except the database report builder and some wizards). How do you proceed? What formats are not cloned? Note that only entire cell formats are cloned, not in-cell inline text formatting.
[Is Java required to run events for form controls? I kind of thought it was…]
I’ve never seen it fail, spanning from LO 6.2 to 7.3 on Win10, so it’s not a common issue. You are talking about the paint roller/brush icon, correct? Are you cloning only direct formatting? Are you trying to clone conditional formatting or a style?
What is direct formatting? So far I have been unable to find an explanation.
As for the Clone Formatting problem, see my update for further discussion.
After further study, I found the fundamental problem was CVS files not being formatted correctly when imported.
Until recently I had been using Apache OO as my office suite, and its calc sheet would convert number cells in CVS files to numeric format. In contrast LO was converting number cells in CVS files to text format. The formula bar did not show a leading apostrophe to indicate text format, so I presumed it was numeric format. Eventually I started to format an imported cell and found it was formatted as text. Failure of LO Calc to indicate text format in the formula bar seems like an oversight.
Furthermore, apparently Clone Formatting does not clone numeric format to cells with text format. That seems to me like a possible bug.
I was about to give up on LO Calc, until I clicked “Detect special numbers” under Other Options of Text Import when opening a CVS file. That formats number cells in CVS files to numeric format in the ODS file, as desired. Subsequently, I can use Clone Formatting to convert numeric formats to currency formats.
I would like to thank @erAck for ruling out Java as the problem, and @joshua4 for his helpful response.
Failure of LO Calc to indicate text format in the formula bar seems like an oversight.
Rather, it’s different locale setting in your AOO vs LO instances: your AOO is configured to some locale that matches your CSV numbers, and your LO is configured to a different locale that uses different number format - maybe different decimal separator. That leads to, say, 123.456 being a number in AOO, but not a number in LO (and since it can’t be treated as a number, it isn’t indicated specially in a general-format cell, like as qwerty string wouldn’t be indicated in both suites).
Or you may have a customized locale setting in CSV import in AOO, while haven’t made that customization in LO’s CSV import. IIRC, that customization gets remembered, so you could set it once in the past, and forget about that. Custom locale set in CSV import would allow LO to use that locale’s rules, and correctly import the numbers.