I am a new-comer to the OO users forum. I posted this problem on Friday 2006-06-16 and received a very prompt response from Dave (TAS). Thanks! Here is the clarification that Dave was seeking regarding my problem, & also a possible solution that I have tried out for myself:
Downloading - this was a MS Excel sreadsheet of numerical values, including some text headings & dates, provided daily by a financial web-site to which I subscribe/pay. When I click onto the link to obtain this data, Windows describes it as a MS Excel file & asks 'do you want to open this file or save it?' Clicking on either box provides me very quickly/efficiently with a MS Excel spreadsheet which I can open with OpenOffice. My problem has been that every numeric, $value, and date, field in this 'table' appears in its own cell in the spreadsheet, but with a single quote mark in front of each of the values, converting it to text. If I use the SUM or any other math function on these cells, OO Calc (& presumably Excel) simply ignores those (text)amounts but includes any number values I have separately input into the spreadsheet myself. Dave's suggestion of highlighting/ selecting & reformatting a number format for the culprit cells unfortunately has absolutely no effect on them; they just retain their 'text' quotation mark. The rather cumbersome alternative I have now adopted (based on Dave's question of whether it was an HTML webpage file) is to save the downloaded spreadsheet in OO HMTL format, re-open it in OO Writer, Edit/select all, and copy the contents into a blank Calc spreadsheet where I 'Paste Special' them as RTF (rich text format). OO Calc then accepts these cells as numbers (without any format prefix) and allows me to operate on them with SUM or other functions & to re-define their number format individually. This solution does not work if I open the HTML file within OO Calc, as Calc does not provide the RTF format as an option in this situation. My new solution appears very cumbersome, but at least I can now work on my down-loaded data in OpenOffice Calc. Thank you again, Dave. Any other suggestions from other subscribers? Kind regards, Royce G.
