> >Brian Barker wrote: > >>Either that or the care taken by the user? Let's be fair: you need > >>to test and reproduce such a problem before you can rightly assume > >>that it is a bug. bg: > > > >Right you are, Brian - of course it's more a matter of ignorance > >than of lack of care....
brian: > I hope that didn't come across as dismissive or overly critical ... bg: Nah. I really was ignorant of some of these elements. I operate on a more or less "need to know" basis - learning things about software as the need arises :-) bg: > >As far as I've ever been aware, most any spreadsheet defaults to > >numbers if that's the first thing you type into it - only formatting > >as text if the first-typed character is non-numeric. Have I been misinformed? brian: > I don't claim to understand the details of this. Things get more > complicated when you paste material in. The bottom line interesting piece in all of this is that the bifurcation between the two formats did not at all follow the bifurcation of the sourcing. IOW some .csv imports displayed as text, and some numeric; and the corollary - some manually typed entries one way, and some the other. That's the part that really has me scratching my head. I could understand it better if all .csv imports displayed as texts, and all manual adds displayed as numeric. bg: > a leading single quote - an artifact whose presence > >is a complete mystery to me. brian: > That - which should display only in the Input line, not in the cell - > indicates a text entry in a number-formatted cell. bg: Another thing of which I wasn't aware, thanks. Part of my awareness problem with this is that I am in the habit of rarely ever even looking at the Input Line unless I need, for example, to edit out a typo in a long entry. That line just isn't normally on my radar screen for whatever reason. brian: > But you don't need to change these values manually. In a new column, enter > =VALUE(xx) > and fill or copy it down the column. This will take both your text > and number values and produce numbers. Now copy the results and > paste them back over the original results, but using Paste Special > instead of ordinary Paste; in the Paste Special dialogue, ensure that > Numbers is ticked and Formulas is *not* ticked. bg: Thanks - I'd already done it manually, but that's a good trick to know. brian: > Mind you, ZIP data should probably all be text, in fact. bg: That's an intriguing notion. Since ZIPs only ever consist of numbers, why would it be preferable to store them as text? So as to avoid confusion with "real" numbers? Thanks for the help, Brewster -- *********************************************************************** Embrace a sharing community of sustainable justice low-carbon diversity *********************************************************************** W. Brewster Gillett [email protected] Portland, OR USA *********************************************************************** Simply because you don't like to hear it, that doesn't make it untrue. *********************************************************************** --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
