At 06:22 20/11/2008 -0500, Meenie Noname wrote:
I just started using Oo and opened an excel spreadsheet in it (my
inventory for my jewelry business)
It opened fine and all the functions seem to work well and pretty
much like excel except for two things:
1. When I try to cut and paste a range of cells - in excel you copy
the range, then right click the row you want to enter the cells
above. You get a box and one of the choices is "insert copied
cells". but you don't get that choice in Oo.
If I tried to just click paste nothing happens, If I try paste
special I get an error message saying something about merged cells -
but my cells aren't merged!
I'm sure there's a way to do this, I just can't seem to figure it out!!
If you use Paste, something should happen: namely, the pasted values
or formulae should replace whatever was in the target cell range. If
this doesn't happen, you have an additional problem! In order to
insert copied cells, moving other values to make space (and many
other similar functions), you should use Paste Special. In the Paste
Special dialogue, under "Shift cells", you can choose Down or Right
as required. You should find that you can achieve most things this
way. You can find Paste Special... in the context menu if that is
what you prefer.
If you see the error message "Inserting into merged ranges not
possible", then you must have some merged cells somewhere. Note that
the merged cells may not be in the range where you are pasting your
material, but instead elsewhere but still affected by the paste
operation. Moving existing cells down or right moves the contents of
cells all the way to the bottom or right of the spreadsheet
respectively - even if those cells are empty. Your problem merged
cells could be anywhere in these areas, even some distance from the
cells you want to affect.
You are more likely to create problems of this sort if you are
pasting entire rows or columns instead of explicit ranges of
cells. There are two solutions: either copy the actual cells you
need rather than rows or columns; or demerge the problem cells, paste
the material, and merge the necessary cells again.
2. background color
I have a sheet with a description and price for each item I make.
When it sells I colored it pink. I felt the pink was a bit too pale
and wanted to change the color to salmon, but when I highlight the
area and click on background color on the menu, the background color
just goes away. I don't get the color grid to choose another color.
I can right click and go to format cells, etc but would rather do it
from the menu bar (it's quicker)
I cannot see how this can happen with my version (3.0 for Windows),
but it is possible that older versions were different. You describe
"background color on the menu", but there is no menu entry for this
that I can see. Do you mean the Background Color button on the
Formatting toolbar? There should be a down arrow just to the right
of this; if this is separate from the button, use that instead. Does
that show the palette? (As I say, this down-arrow is not a separate
control in my version, but perhaps yours is different.)
Another thing to remember is that you cannot expect OpenOffice to
work as fully and smoothly if you are keeping your document in Excel
(.xls) format instead of OpenOffice's native format (.ods). Try
saving your document as "ODF Spreadsheet (.ods)" type and see if that
helps. You can always save a copy in Excel format if you ever need
to go back to using Excel.
I trust this helps.
Brian Barker
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