Re: [libreoffice-users] Formatting in LO spreadsheet

At 23:16 30/06/2014 +0200, Rob Jasper wrote:
> Indeed when I look at the formatting after saving and reopening the 
> file, the formatting changed from #0,00# to #0,000 .
>
> All predefined number formats are saved, and restored upon 
> reopening. If I define a user-defined format, it is all of a sudden 
> not saved...

No, that's not true: it's just this particular - and rather unusual - 
format with a hash after the zeroes (rather than before) that 
evidently cannot be saved. Note that such formats are apparently 
*never* saved as such in ODF files - just a description in a 
different form that indicates the same format, but which is not 
capable of describing the unusual format that you have chosen.

> Also, if I save in MS .xlsx format it comes up fine in both MS-Excel 
> (Excel for Mac 2011, V14.0.0 (100825)). If I open that file with LO 
> it has also my defined formatting still available.

I'm guessing, then, that the actual format character sequence is 
saved in that file format.

> Regardless what the technical cause is for this, it is at least user 
> unfriendly?

Possibly.

> Questions to be asked:
> - What use has a user defined number format, if it can't be saved?

Come, come: user-defined formats generally *can* be saved, just not 
all of them - and apparently not your rather unusual one. Perhaps the 
designers of Star Office / OpenOffice / LibreOffice based the format 
code on Microsoft's, knowing that it could saved in Microsoft's 
document formats? Could it perhaps be saved in the old Star Office .sxc format?

> - If this is indeed a restriction in the ODF definition, why is LO 
> not warning like "The defined format can not be saved in the desired 
> file format"?

Dunno.

> - Why does LO consider the format change a change in the first 
> place? (If I open the file, change the format as I like it, it is 
> considered changed, while the file stays exactly the same)

Any change is a change, including a format change. You wouldn't 
change the format if you didn't want that to change something. This 
situation is rather as if you replaced some character in a document 
with an identical character: the document is still considered 
changed. Indeed, there may be unobvious ways in which it actually will be.

> - Should we consider this as a flaw in the ODF definitions?

That's a value judgement for you to make. It's certainly something 
that can be handled in Calc but apparently not saved in an ODF document.

> Where can we complain about this?

Either to OASIS (if you want the ODF format modified to allow this) 
or to the LibreOffice bug reporting system (if you want your original 
format not to work even at first, or if you want a warning that it 
cannot be saved in ODF documents).

Brian Barker  


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