Hi all,
If I copy a text from a text editor into Calc, it asks what I want the cell separators to be (tab, space, etc), but that doesn’t work the other way round so sometimes I have to replace all the subsequent tabs in a newly created text file with spaces. Is there a way to tell Calc to export cell separators as spaces instead of tabs?
Thanks,
Tom
A workarount might be to ‘Paste Special…’ (Ctrl+Shift+V) with option ‘Formatted text [RTF]’ .
This way you get a table which you may select as a whole and 'Table' > 'Convert' > 'Table to Text' with (e.g.) a space chosen as the separator.
If you can get exactly your wanted result will depend on circumstances I don’t know of.
@Lupp’s answer will not produce a fixed width result. For example, this:
Becomes this:
a d
b c e
A better way is to go to File → Save As and choose Save as type: Text CSV. Check Edit filter settings and then Fixed column width. The result:
a d
b c e
Some text editors such as Vim can also do this. Copy and paste from Calc into Vim and then do :retab as described at http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Converting_tabs_to_spaces.
For more precise control, write a macro like https://superuser.com/a/121206/541756. That example uses Excel, but I’ve seen similar examples recently for LibreOffice.