https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101696
--- Comment #5 from Eike Rathke <[email protected]> ---
First, LibreOffice Calc does *not* convert MARCH1 or SEPT2 to date, contrary to
what is said in the original report
http://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7
It (and OpenOffice.org and ...) *did* convert MARCH1 to date (but not SEPT2, it
could had happened with SEP2 though), but that was fixed for bug 41166 already
with release 4.2.5
So whatever version they used to test things for a report published on
2016-08-23, it was too old, and the statement cited as "To date, there is no
way to permanently deactivate automatic conversion to dates in MS Excel and
other spreadsheet software such as LibreOffice Calc or Apache OpenOffice Calc."
simply is wrong in this context.
Second, of course 2310009E13 is a number, but not 2.31E+13 as given in the
report but 2.310009E+019 instead. Do not trust a scientific publication ;-)
This number recognition is *expected* from a spreadsheet application, yes even
when pasting some copied data. If all data is to be treated as literal text
then doing one of these helps, as already mentioned in earlier comments:
* applying the Text number format to all target cells before pasting
* pasting as unformatted text instead of HTML (or whatever the source format
was) and in the text import dialog select Text as column type
* using a common proper data format for tabular text exchange: CSV or TSV, and
again select columns to be Text in the import dialog
I don't think a "treat all pasted input as text" configuration option would
help anything because those scientists wouldn't know that either.
The only thing that could help is detecting a conversion to number or date in
between runs of mere text strings within one column and then nag the user about
it. But such nag boxes quickly get annoying until ignored.
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