Firstly, I will admit that my geekspeak vocabulary also is virtually non-existent. I find that most of the support pages I have turned to use a language that is totally inaccessible for me. I also concur that OpenOffice help files are very technical & do not give me any clues. 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 OpenOffice HMTL format, re-open it in OO Writer, Edit> select all, and copy the document contents into a blank Calc spreadsheet where I 'Paste Special' them as RTF (rich text format). OpenOffice Calc then accepts these cells as numbers (without any format prefix) and allows me to operate on them with SUM or other math functions & to individually re-define their number format.
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. This now seems to be a large & quite widespread problem. I first raised it when I joined this mailgroup 11 days ago (16 June 2006). I received an immediate fix from Johnny by way of a macro he wrote for me to remove the leading ' quote mark; this method was also suggested by Donald Locker Kind regards, Royce Green 28 Durran Street TUGUN QLD 4224 AUSTRALIA
