Hi :) Brilliant workaround :) (as always). I was going to suggest allowing it to open in Writer then select a tab space and use "Find&replace" to swap them to commas, then save the file as .csv rather than .txt. Double clicking on a csv file should open it in Calc/Excel. Much more messy but easier for many people to understand. Regina's elegant answer is much better imo but it can be good to have choices :) Good luck and regards from Tom :)
________________________________ From: Regina Henschel <rb.hensc...@t-online.de> To: users@global.libreoffice.org Sent: Sun, 19 June, 2011 20:58:46 Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Calc Major Bug Hi Andrew, Andrew Foss schrieb: > I need to open a tab delimited text file in Calc. I have done this many times > in Excel where you have to Open the File from inside Excel. However, trying to > open it with Calc launches Writer (ugh!!!). It seems the programmers have gone > to great lengths to stop one doing what you wants and needs to do. Obviously, > if one is inside Calc, any file one tries to open should open inside Calc. > That's a no brainer. That is not so obvious. Word and Excel are different programs, Word can only handle text documents and Excel can only handle spreadsheets. But LibreOffice is not a collection of 6 programs (Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress, Math, Base), but is is one program, that offers different UIs for the different tasks. Therefore a file, that looks like a text file will be opened in Writer as long as you don't determine explicitly what part to use. And a tab delimited text file contains nothing, which indicates that it is not a text file. > > > How can I work around this problem? I tried tyo merge in the file but that >also > failed. I tried changing the file extension but LO ignored that. I tried > caopy/paste into Calc but Calc failed to put each tab delimited field into a > separate cell so that failed. Hopeless! (1) Inside LibreOffice use File > Open. It does not matter where you are. It might be Writer or Impress or wherever. You get a file picker dialog. (2) Select the file you want to open. (3) The dialog has a drop-down list 'file type'. Open it and scroll down to the section where are the spreadsheet formats. Choose type 'Text CSV (*.csv,*.txt)'. Open. (4) You get the import dialog. Set the needed parameters. Be careful about language, date and number formats. Kind regards Regina -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to users+h...@global.libreoffice.org In case of problems unsubscribing, write to postmas...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to users+h...@global.libreoffice.org In case of problems unsubscribing, write to postmas...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
