https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150264
--- Comment #11 from Mike Kaganski <mikekagan...@hotmail.com> --- The UX problem is that people tend to confuse (mix) formatting to cell data type. In Calc, a cell can contain a text, a number, or a formula. The actual type of data in the cell is defined at entry type, and then never changes until another entry happens. Also there is a cell format, including a "number format string"; and the dialog categorized different pre-configured (and user-defined) format strings into categories, like "Number", "Percent", "Date", "Time", "Text", etc. Usually inexperienced users don't really understand the fundamental difference between data and its representation, and that it's perfectly legal and normal that e.g. a cell formatted "Date" may contain a text that *looks like* date, but is not a date. People also may get large amount of data (e.g., from copy-paste), that arrives as text into Calc cells, which users then want to convert to a number (e.g., to dates). And the users tend to expect that applying a Date *format* to the cells, they will get those cells contain dates, when they had strings previously, like "01/02/03". It is really large proportion of questions e.g. on Ask site, asking why Calc doesn't work (just because it doesn't match the mentioned expectation). Answering this: one of the main "whys" is because data conversion is always a destructive process (you will loose leading/trailing zeros, number of digits in year, spaces, digits that don't fit into machine number representation, lots of things when convert a string into a matching number; you will make the resulting number be shown using numeric format, potentially breaking your titles) - and formatting is usually done on large ranges (like whole columns), potentially breaking data somewhere out of your current view, if the re-formatting would be allowed to change the data itself. But given how strong this expectation is in users, it might be reasonable to have some *explicitly opt-in* way in the format dialog to refer to the data conversion. This is what this proposal is about: either allow users to use this dialog itself to *also* convert (matching) data, or to provide a link to the conversion functionality, so that users would be able to discover it from where they look for it. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
