I’m trying to make a table in LibreOffice Writer 6.4.4.2 on Pop_OS. I want the numbers to have thousands separators. In one cell it just acts like text and I have no trouble adding commas as desired. In another cell of the table it is automatically eliminating the comma every time I try to type it. I know how to handle this in Calc. I can’t find any documentation on how this works in Writer. The closest I could find is a help page for Writer that says “Choose Tools - Options - LibreOffice Writer - Table, and select or clear the Number recognition check box.” I unchecked it but it didn’t help. The same help page also claimed that one could right-click the table’s cell to control Number Recognition but I see no such option.
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Did you select one of the tables styles (Default Style, Academic, Box List x…, Elegant,…) when creating the table in Writer? If yes - which one? Background of the question: These tables do have predefined formatting of their cells - e.g. Academic style table has Text formatting for row and column headers and Number formatting for all other cells as per default, while the Default Style has Text formatting for all of its cells.
To change the format: Select one or more cells and go to Table -> Number Format and define the format of your cells (quite similar to Calc).
Number formatting in TextTable is a mess. However, there is a way, but strangely not via the context menu of a CellRange or of single cells, but via the main menu item >Table>Number Format....
You may insert this submenu item also to the mentioned context menu via >Tools>Customize.
Anyway you need to know a bit about NumberFormat codes to make use of the feature.
Otherwise you can enter anything looking like a number as a text if you make sure that for your table the option >Table>Number Recognition is disabled completely (all cells).
(By the way: The usage of the comma as a group separator for numbers is explicitly deprecated by international standards.)
thanks so much! I missed that item on the menu. Was mostly looking under the Format menu.
None of the above worked for me. Only initially it seemed to work, but after some formatting, the annoying function was back. Next to formating all cells to “text” I also need to add some text element. An invisible non-breaking space is not enough. I used an asterisk which I gave a white color. Use case: a table with statistical information must have cells which contain " .001". And it should be able to contain only those characters without converting them to zero or adding leading zeros.
I must seriously consider changing to another software because of this.
Don’t wait. 
This is probably a different question. But you gave absolutely no usable information: OS name, LO version and save format. We have no idea about your table contents. So ask your own question and attach a sample file.
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