How do you convert numbers to text?

  1. 4.2.6.3, English, Calc
  2. W7 of Windows (current fixes applied)

In a spreadsheet that someone else created (Lotus Symphony converted to Lotus 123 converted to .ODS) there is a column with note references in it that are numeric in some cells and alphabetic in the others. When I sort the 1300 rows on this column, the numbers come first and the alphabetic text numbers come later. I want to convert the numeric numbers to text so that the rows will sort the rows with numeric 2’s in the sort column along with the rows with text 2’s.

Formatting the numeric cells as text (@) does not change the sorting order to accomplish the above desired result. I have looked and looked and cannot find a way a to convert numbers to text. Hopefully there is a function much like you have for convert each word of text to having the first letter capitalized with the remaining part of the word in lower case.

Is there a way in LibreOffice Calc to convert the numeric numbers to text numbers?

Thank you for time and effort… Peter Bradish, Titusville, FL

1 Like

The TEXT function can help you.

https://help.libreoffice.org/4.4/Calc/Text_Functions#TEXT

Select the column.
Menu/Data/Text to column.
Click on the column header.
In column type select Text.
Ok.

Worked like a charm. Thank you very much. I never realized that “Text to column” in the Data drop down menu meant converting from numeric to text. Now all I have left is to strip out leading blanks in some of the other cells in that column and I can send the results on to another researcher. :slight_smile:

Fabulous answer. I had been tormented by the java.lang.IllegalStateException: Cannot get a text value from a numeric cell for over three days. Thank you

Perfect Solution, worked perfectly for me, too!

Therr is a Calc function NUMBERTEXT downloadable from here.

Give it a try.