Dear Eike, m.a.risov and Christopher, Thanks for taking your time with this.
As a programmer concerned about user experience (which sometimes I get to practise, when not battling with spreadsheets), the userland behaviour is pretty weird. Why is there an apostrophe in the input line and not in the cell? That breaks all my assumptions about the relationship between the input line and the cell. For example, if I enter a ' into the input line, when a Text formatted cell is selected, I get a ' in the cell. Suddenly making a ' appear in the input line without it being in the cell is strange. Current behaviour seems like a cheap hack to get out of doing some actual conversion logic and user interaction. e.g. 1. Cell chars are all numerals, looks like an integer, no problem -> integer 2. Cell chars might look like a decimal number maybe with a , or a . or an E: ask the user what to do (locale-dependent sensible default required) 3. Function text is included (e.g. =, SUM(A1:A10), etc.) if it parses, -> no problem 4. Something else is there, random text, whatever. Then just apply number format to the cell and behave as though the user typed the same string of chars into the cell. I hope that you can see that these solutions are, from a user perspective, somewhat more appealing than the current behaviour which is something like: prepend a ', but only display it in the input line and not in the cell. Don't warn the user that this has happened because of an unwillingness to change the underlying datatype of the cell. Also don't tell them that they have to apply an obscure, terse regex to get rid of the ' and make the data how they want it: let them try to find it on the wiki (assumes motivation and a working internet connection). Allow them to waste their time working out how to reenter their data / figure out the correct combination of copy-paste options. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to libreoffice in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1305877 Title: [Upstream] ' prepended when applying Number Category to Text Category cell with a number in it Status in LibreOffice Productivity Suite: Confirmed Status in “libreoffice” package in Ubuntu: Triaged Bug description: 1) lsb_release -rd Description: Ubuntu Trusty Tahr (development branch) Release: 14.04 2) apt-cache policy libreoffice-calc libreoffice-calc: Installed: 1:4.2.3~rc3-0ubuntu2 Candidate: 1:4.2.3~rc3-0ubuntu2 Version table: *** 1:4.2.3~rc3-0ubuntu2 0 500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status 3) What is expected to happen in Calc is secondary click an an empty cell -> Format Cells... -> under Category choose Text -> click button OK -> in that cell type 1 -> secondary click the cell -> Format Cells... -> under Category choose Number -> click button OK and when one clicks the cell the input line just shows 1, as it does in Microsoft Excel 2003 (11.5612.8172). 4) What happens instead is it shows: '1 WORKAROUND: Set the cell Category to Number prior to inserting numbers. ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04 Package: libreoffice-calc 1:3.5.7-0ubuntu5 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-60.91-generic 3.2.55 Uname: Linux 3.2.0-60-generic x86_64 NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu17.6 Architecture: amd64 Date: Thu Apr 10 14:10:51 2014 InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64+mac (20120823.1) MarkForUpload: True SourcePackage: libreoffice UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/df-libreoffice/+bug/1305877/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
