https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77317

--- Comment #7 from Michael Doube <[email protected]> ---
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.

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