https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64374
--- Comment #3 from Kevin Loughrey <[email protected]> --- Dear Folks I had given some thought to the points you have raised below and, putting on my engineer's purist hat, I would have to agree with you. However, for this package to be the best in the world, it has to be able to be used by people who are not immersed in computing science. Using obscure regular expressions is therefore (as much as it might be convenient for the knowledgeable) just not acceptable. Absolutely not acceptable. A vestige of the past. We have to do better. That's the point of a GUI. The next point is the matter of changing the data. If you change something from text to numeric, you have changed the data. What we are talking about here is the degree to which the data is altered. If a person elects to turn a column into numeric format, in most instances they would appreciate the application cleansing any data that is not numeric (even carriage returns and other detritus that may have made its way into the columns). Having said this, as an engineer, I'm not totally comfortable with it even though I know that people (like my wife) who are simply users of computers would think this is a good thing. So I then thought of a compromise. What if there were a checkbox with a label "Force Numeric Content". If the user ticks the check box, they are signalling that they do want the application to parse each cell, delete all non-numerics and then format the remaining numerical characters according to the format they have specified, for example, -$1,234.00. Hope you find these thoughts helpful. Thank you very much for taking the time to write to me. Warmest regards Kevin Loughrey CPEng -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: [Bug 64374] EDITING: Removal of leading apostrophe when formatting cells from alphanumeric to numeric Date: Thu, 09 May 2013 14:46:25 +0000 mariosv changed bug 64374 What Removed Added CC [email protected] Comment # 2 on bug 64374 from mariosv Hi Kevin, it is right, change the format NEVER change the content (I hope so). With Find&Replace to delete the leading apostrophe (try search in: values, or find: '(.*) replace: $1 with regular expressions activated), all works for me; or besides the option referred by Jacques, if data came from an import, set up the import options to a proper data interpretation. If data are pasted, use pasted special - unformatted to get the window with the import options. ________________________________________________________________________ You are receiving this mail because: * You reported the bug. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
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