I have a somewhat obscure problem that I'm struggling with. I'm the
newsletter editor for a local club. I do the newsletter in OOo Writer. A
big part of this newsletter is listing results of our events (athletic
competition). I obtain these results from our web site, which has them
in a space-delimited form such as the example below (they "look right"
when they are in a fixed width font like Courier):
1. Zachary Smith 17:42
2. Matthew and Jennifer Brown 31:02
3. Elizabeth Jones 35:00
I can pull them into the Writer document as is, but the problem is they
almost never fit into a column with the number of spaces that are used
on the web site. I find it best if I replace the string of spaces with a
tab stop, so I have better flexibility in moving the tab stop around to
get things to look "right" in the newsletter.
So far I have been manually highlighting the string of spaces and
replacing them with a tab stop. This is quite time consuming, since
there are a lot of events and many lines of results for each event.
One alternative I tried is copying the results into a Calc spreadsheet,
and using the add-on Text to Columns feature to separate them into
columns. The problem with this is that Calc insists on converting the
times into a non-meaningful (to me anyway) decimal; for example 20:00
(which is 20 minutes) is converted in 0.83 (which I assume is the
fraction of a day that 20 hours is). This happens even if I pre-format
the entire sheet to text format. I've figured out how to convert this
decimal back into the right number of minutes, but the problem then is
that it is in minutes and decimal minutes (21.5 for example) instead of
minutes and seconds (21:30). I know I could figure out a way by going
through a number of operations to get 21.5 to read 21:30 again, but at
some point, this becomes more work than manually replacing the spaces
with tabs would be.
Doing a find and replace in Writer can help a bit but the problem is
that the number of spaces varies all over the map from line to line.
Does anyone have any suggestions on processing this information that
would simplify things? Thanks very much.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
