Thanks to All! Really quick responses. I have created a new folder in
Thunderbird to save mail from this group as the responses are really
good. Paul's response was first and lead me to an easy answer. My dialog
box had a check for "Quoted field as text". When I unchecked this box
the numbers came in as numbers.
In my files most fields were included in double quotes,", rather than
the single quotes as in Paul's example. Interesting to me the date field
was preceded by 3 quotes and followed by one and it still comes in with
a leading ' in the formula window but that doesn't hurt. All text fields
still come in as text so I am good.
Thanks again.
Bill Dillinger
On 5/2/2012 10:48 AM, Paul M. Nguyen wrote:
I believe the dialog box that appears when you attempt to open a .csv
file allows you to specify various characteristics of how the file is
structured. The fields could be tab-delimited or comma-delimited (or
any arbitrary character) and fields may be enclosed in other
punctuation that OOo can strip out for you in interpreting that
file... Would you mind attaching a couple rows worth of your sample
input so we can help you find the right import settings?
If your data looks like what is in the file I attached, then the
correct settings for you would be to set the Separator options to
comma-delimited and change the drop-down "Text delimiter" to a single
quote (') instead of backtick (`) which was the default on my system
(OOo 3.3 on Mac OS X 10.6.8). You'll see the quotes removed in the
preview before you finish opening the file.
Good luck!
--
Paul M. Nguyen
On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:25 AM, Bill Dillinger <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
When I download my bank statements they come as .csv files. When I
open these in the Open Office spreadsheet the fields with numbers come
in as characters and the formula window shows them to be preceded by
a quote, ', mark. I have looked through 'help' but have not found
a way
to remove the leading quote or to reformat the column to numbers so
they can be used in calculations.
I would appreciate it if someone would tell me how to change these
columns
of characters into numbers.
