I have seen somewhere some users were asking aobut the possibility to specify the decimal separator as in MS Excel on importing text file into Calc.
Anyone knows why it is still no implemented?
It does look to me like a rocket science. I frequently need to be able to open text files with different date and number formats and I don’t know (and don’t care) what is the locale of that file, I just look inside and see what is there.
Will be this easy feature ever implemented in LibreOffice Calc?
If you mean “detect special numbers” ->“The selected language influences how such special numbers are detected…”
This does not help very much.
date format examples:
yyyy-mm-dd, yyyy.mm.dd, yyyy mm dd,dd.mm.yyyy
grouping separator could be comma, dot(.), space, apostroph
decimal separator could be comma or dot(.)
I really don’t know what could be the language for yyyy mm dd (separator is a space) date format and apostroph as grouping separator and comma as decimal.
Or dd.mm.yyyy and decimal separator dot.
This applies for other combinations too.
Sure I could try every language, but it could happen there is no such locale as the file I receive from somewhere.
Separators and date formats are tied to locales. There is no “easy feature” to implement as guessing all variants of all dates correctly is nearly impossible, take an ambiguous 03/04/20, could be April 3rd 2020, March 4th 2020, or even April 20 2003. There is no locale that uses YYYY MM DD with space separator. If data received contains such then import as text and replace blanks with minus, or use the CT2N extension. Anyway, choose a locale that matches at least the decimal separator used in the file, e.g. en-US for . dot or a non-English European one for , comma. If the numeric data contains different group separators it gets more complicated of course, but is that really the case or is it just hypothetical. For selected columns you can specify the date order in column types. An ISO 8601 yyyy-mm-dd date format is recognized in all locales.
“Separators and date formats are tied to locales” While in MS Excel they are not tied and I can specify the decimal separator and date order.