Disable Scientific Auto-Formatting, Forever

I’ve found multiple articles asking similar questions: “How do you prevent LibreOffice Calc from converting Numbers to Scientific Notation?” Every answer I’ve found indicates how to Re-Format your cells to “Number” afterwards, or to “Text” before pasting. This seems to be a constant throughout LibreOffice, Excel and Google Sheets.

I don’t want to see an Auto-Conversion to the Scientific Notation - EVER!! If I WANT Scientific Notation, I’ll go change the Cell Format myself. I’ve read there are computational limitations if a number contains too many digits… Ok, I haven’t delved that deep into the issue.

My problem is: I’ve been working with Hexadecimal Numbers a lot lately, and when pasting 1000+ rows of numbers, it is not always apparent that, say “25E6” which might be on Row 1409, gets converted. Only after all my cell, text and string permutations do I notice the foul-up. And often times, it’s a lot of time and effort to undo the damage.

Yes, I know it is possible to “prevent” this issue with the answers I found, listed above. I DON’T want to THINK about it. This automatic behaviour should be automatic the OTHER way around (automatically NOT converting to Scientific Notation… and apologies for the over-gripy tone of this post). I would love to have a Checkbox in Options: “Auto-convert to Scientific Notation”, On / Off. The same goes for Date Formatting too in my opinion.

I’ve looked through settings and read 15 articles, but I’ve found nothing. Is there a setting I might have missed? Is there a Macro that could disable an auto-conversion? An Extension even maybe? In the high chance where there is no valid solution, would there be any value in submitting this as a Feature Request to the LibreOffice Development Team?

LibreOffice Calc handles the “hexadecimal numbers” containing ABCDEF digits as text. If a “hexa number” has not contain at least one of these characters, then the Calc will recognise it as a decimal number.

You can performat the target cells as Text before you paste or type-in your “hexadecimal numbers”. This will deactivate the number recognition feature in those cells.

  1. Open a blank, new spreadsheet document.
  2. Open the stylist window (F11). There is a pre-defined cell style named “Text”. This is poorly configured. Right-click>Edit… and change the number format to “Text” (number format code @). In addition, I would add some background color in order to make these special cells optically distinguishable.
  3. File>Templates>Save … and save this file under some template name.
  4. File>Templates>Manage… [Ctrl+Shift+N], right-click your template and check “Default template”.

From now on, every new spreadsheet document will be made from this template. Prepare your text cells (such as bin or hex numbers) with that cell style. Select cell range(s), double-click style in the stylist window. Input into the prepared cells starting with ‘=’ won’t be interpreted as formulas. Numeric text won’t be interpreted as numbers. Input starting with an apostroph will treat the apostrophe as a literal first character.
For further customizations, call File>Templates>Manage… and open your template for editing (right-click>Edit).

Considering some of the implications …
See attachment:
disask114832disableAutomaticNumberFormats.ods (29.3 KB)