At 12:56 04/02/2015 -0500, Vincent A. Juliano wrote:
Writing mixed numbers in both tables and spread sheet and having them change format. This has been an ongoing problem for me with trying to enter mixed numbers into a table and/or into a spreadsheet. What occurs initially is that the mixed number can be entered but after several entries the mixed number appears as a date. For example. mixed numbers such as 3-5/64 can be entered for about 4 or 5 entries. Then the following entries will be entered as 6-14/64 and immediately upon hitting the enter key the number will change to 06/14/64. All following entering mixed numbers will change to the date format. How can the original mixed number format be retained? This phenomenon occurs in both the table format and in the spreadsheet so I would suspect the problem lies in the basic setup of the number system.
This problem is that these programs do things which are generally helpful but that you need in this specific case to disable. It is easy to do this in various ways:
o You can disable the effect in text document tables by removing the tick from Tools | Options... | OpenOffice Writer | Table | Input in tales | Number format recognition.
o You can disable the effect in spreadsheet entries by formatting the relevant cells as Text before making the entries.
o You can disable changes to individual entries in spreadsheets by preceding them with an apostrophe. Note that for this to work you need either to disable the automatic correction of single quotes to "smart quotes" or else to follow typing the quote by Edit | Undo or Ctrl+Z to cancel that correction. You will see the apostrophe in the Input Line for the relevant cell but it will not be displayed in the cell itself - and the value of the cell contents will not include the apostrophe.
o Another way of getting the text you want into a cell with arbitrary formatting is to enter ="<whatever>".
Your experience of a change in behaviour as you enter values is probably caused by a variation in the existing cell formatting.
You may want to read about entering spreadsheet data the first three pages of Chapter 2 of the Calc Guide.
I trust this helps. Brian Barker --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.apache.org
