Hi again Celia,
I have looked a little further at the Expand Formatting option.
The first thing to say is that we need to correct the description of this interaction in Chapter 14 of the next English version of the Calc Guide (once we are clear exactly what behaviour is implemented!). As the same text is in the Help files, we will need to change that too.
It is also worth noting that Bug 94499 (first raised in 2015) exists on this function relating to the impact on non-empty cells when the Expand Formatting option is ticked.
With regards to your main point about a restart of LO being required, I did not find that necessary. The following steps showed that selecting the Expand Formatting option certainly had some effect without a restart. Perhaps you could try out these steps and see whether you agree?
1. Open Calc from the Start Center in its default configuration, i.e.
Expand Formatting unticked.
2. Check that Calc has created a new document named “Untitled 1”.
3. Type any character string into cell A1 (e.g. “abcd”). Type any
number into cell B1 (e.g. “123.4”). The text in A1 should be left
justified and the number in B1 should be right justified.
4. Select cell A1 and change the formatting on the cell (via Format >
Cells) to “Text”. There should be no obvious change visible to the
contents of cells A1 and B1.
5. Change the value displayed in B1 to something different. The new
value should be displayed right justified (as you might expect).
6. Go to Tools > Options > LibreOffice Calc > General and tick the
Expand Formatting option and press OK.
7. Type any character string into cell A10. Type any number into cell
B10. The text in A10 should be left justified and the number in B10
should be right justified.
8. Select cell A10 and change the formatting on the cell (via Format >
Cells) to “Text”. There should be no obvious change visible to the
contents of cells A10 and B10.
9. Change the value displayed in B10 to something different. The new
value is displayed left justified, showing that the behaviour
changes following selection of the Expand Formatting option.
There was no closing of either the document, Calc, or LibreOffice during this process, demonstrating that with my setup, no restart was needed. For the record I am running LO Version 7.0.4.2 (x64) under Windows 10.0.
Regards,
Steve