Brian Barker wrote:
At 21:29 03/09/2008 -0500, Barbara Duprey wrote:
What determines whether a calculated table cell in Writer retains the
knowledge of its formula and recalculates when a referenced cell
changes? I inherited a table (originally created in Word) that
remembers the formulas, but the tables I have created retain only the
values and do not respond to changes; the formula bar comes up blank
when I select Table > Formula. I haven't found anywhere this behavior
is set. I must be missing something obvious, but I've looked at the
Help and the Writer guide without finding anything but how to create
the formula. What makes it "stick"?
I have experimented and puzzled for some time without being able to
reproduce this problem, but the cause has suddenly dawned on me.
Everything works hunky-dory if I save a Writer document in .odt
format, but exactly what you describe happens if I save it as .doc and
then reopen it in Writer. Note that the help text includes "Tables,
frames, and multi-column formatting" amongst "features that may cause
conversion challenges" when importing from Microsoft Office formats.
(If I interpret what you say correctly, it is indeed odd that what
originated in Word format can survive subsequent saving and reopening
by Writer, but similar material created in Writer cannot.) I don't
have Microsoft Word available with which to test the .doc file and
discover whether the problem occurs on save or reopen.
Moral: always save documents in OpenOffice's native formats, and save
copies in Microsoft Office formats only when necessary.
Thanks! Yes, the document that works started as .doc and has since been
.odt; the ones that don't start in Writer but were saved as .doc to
share and have since been going through doc-odt-doc conversions when
I've updated. So it's apparently in that first conversion to .doc that
the formulas get lost. Strangely enough, even during the Writer session
(while it's presumably working in .odt) the formulas were lost as soon
as I left the cell. Well, not exactly. When I put a formula into a cell
before saving as .odt, it was there when I reopened, though it didn't
show in the formula bar before the save. Now that I know what's going
on, I can deal with it. Thanks for clearing up the mystery!
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