At 18:25 20/03/2009 -0700, Suzanne L. Perry wrote:
I quickly remembered a solution I've used for years in similar
cases. I defined the suspect column as a range, which I then copied
to Windows Notepad. I knew that Notepad (or any other plain text
editor) would strip everything attached to the numbers.
I very much hope that Notepad does not do this! Why should it carry
out unrequested text editing? (It doesn't.)
I then SELECTED ALL, and pasted it into my spreadsheet. All of my
black text numbers were blue.
That's because you are pasting new values into the cells: one of the
circumstances when Calc takes a fresh look at the entries to
determine their type. Just as if you had originally typed values
with leading blanks, your new values are automatically stored as
numbers. It's Calc that makes this correction, not Notepad. What
Notepad usefully does here is to drop the cell formatting which is
otherwise associated with the values on the clipboard. That
stimulates Calc to take the fresh look.
The frustration arose because I was unable to correct the number
formatting without retyping, as Joe said, which was not an option
for 4500 entries.
[...]
I also consulted the OpenOffice manual by Greg Perry. [...] He
offers no solution for changing a number as text to a number as a
number, without retyping.
One technique is to use the VALUE() function. Applying this function
to your mixture of entries should create only numbers, whether the
originals be numbers or text. Create a temporary new column of
numbers using =VALUE(xx) and then paste it back over the originals,
using Paste Special... with Numbers ticked and Formulas not ticked.
Brian Barker
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