At 11:28 25/07/2008 -0400, Jason Cipriani wrote:
How do I type a hyphen - or a double hyphen -- in a cell without wrestling with auto-complete? Once I type it, if I click anywhere else or move the arrows, it fills in the cell numbers.
You probably realise that this behaviour is caused by Calc's interpreting the hyphen as a minus sign and consequently as the start of a formula instead of as text. One way that you can avoid this is to precede the hyphen by an apostrophe - as you would for entering text that Calc would misinterpret as numbers. The apostrophe does not appear as part of the text in the cell, but merely prevents the interpretation that you are trying to avoid.
Note that this technique is complicated somewhat if you have Custom Quotes enabled, since the apostrophe will then be converted and will become part of the text in the cell. Either disable Custom Quotes (in Tools | AutoCorrect...), or else type apostrophe Ctrl+Z hyphen: here the Ctrl+Z undoes the effect of AutoCorrect, leaving the plain apostrophe as typed.
Another workaround would be to enter some alternative symbol to represent your hyphen and hyphen pair, and then to carry out a global replace to change them to the text you actually need - perhaps just preceding them by a space? Or just to change the design of your spreadsheet to use other text that doesn't start with plus, minus, or equals.
I trust this helps. Brian Barker --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
