Small NeoCalc wishes...

[loganrapp]

I want to preface this with saying that Neo/OpenOffice is an amazing thing. I love it, I'm pretty much sold on it and want to see it become more widely used.

My one issue with NeoCalc - which I use immensely - is when I'm inputting numbers and it decides to automatically parse it. I may put "1-2" in there, and it decides to change it to a date.

Well, I may not want it as a date, and despite using the search feature and help, I have not found any easy way to simply turn that off.

I know that simply hitting space prior to adding that value fixes everything and makes everything all better, but the headache of having to go back through larger spreadsheets because you happened to be transferring written notes to text and didn't catch those four or five times you forgot to hit space can really be avoided with a single dialogue button.

Am I missing it, though? I really don't want to be a complainer here if I'm just too blind to see it, but I think it's important to separate NeoOffice from MS Office by allowing a lot more user customizability (which I believe it already does to a great degree). I think this is just one small avenue where it could go a long way without people really realizing it. I know full well that's one thing Excel did that made me want to leave; it wouldn't let me change the way it operated without having to know how it parses the data I input.

But seriously, correct me if I'm wrong (I may very well be; I'm the type that looks at a full refrigerator complaining that there's nothing to eat/drink), and let me know where I can go to fixing that.

Thanks,

--Logan

[rays]

Hi Logan,

Just an untested thought but if you were to define the cell/column types concerned from being generic to a more specific format before entering the data, does that overcome the problem? If the cell/column is not General/Undefined or Date, does Neo still change the entered data to a date format on exit from the cell thereafter?

Hope this helps.

[LemonAid]

I just tried Ray's suggestion, One column default, Second Column "Text".
Items enter into the second column such as 1-2, 10-3-6, 1-2-6 stay as text.

Sometimes all it takes is to change the default cell/column formatting to get the results you want.
Thanks Ray

Philip (Didn't know that before, but did know about changing formats )

[yoxi]

If for some reason you don't want to change the default cell format setting, a more elegant solution than beginning the cell entry with a space is to begin it with a single quote - Calc (and Excel) read that as meaning 'start a left-justified text entry'. This is why if you want the first character in your cell to be a single quote, you need to enter 2 of them.

There's also an equivalent starting character that forces the cell to be right-justified, but I'm damned if I can remember what it is.

- padmavyuha