Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Trial of LibreOffice

At 17:11 05/10/2016 -0400, Doug McNutt wrote:
> I'm not sure this thread is about my problems but the title sure fits.

You've chosen to bury your enquiry in another thread, in which many 
people may have no interest. Why would you hide your question in this way?

> I open my Excel spreadsheet in a Linux shell using the command 
> "librecalc Finance_16.xls". OpenCalc reads it fine ...

Er, what's OpenCalc, please? Does it have anything to do with 
LibreOffice Calc (or OpenOffice Calc, for that matter)?

> One thing I like to do is to log in to my bank and download their 
> idea of changes for a month or less. [...] The bank likes comma 
> separated ASCII text but in Excel2001 I have to have tab 
> separations. A bit of perl5 fixes that easily but neither seems to 
> work for OpenCalc.

LibreOffice Calc will happily import comma-separated values.

> The dates from Discover or the bank have date values as MM/DD/YYYY. 
> When I place them over in the right ...

Er, what does "placing them over in the right" mean, please?

> ... and allow spreadsheet formulas to move them to the right place ...

Are these formulae to be kept secret from anyone trying to help you?

> ... they come out `MM/DD/YYYY with the starting apostrophe that 
> tells Calc to leave them alone and never convert to date ...

I think it is very difficult to get Calc to convert date inputs to 
text! Perhaps it is those formulae that are at fault? The only 
obvious problem is that your bank's data may perhaps not be in 
MM/DD/YYYY format but instead be quoted as "MM/DD/YYYY". In that 
case, there are two possible solutions:
o Either remove the tick from "Quoted field as text" under "Other 
options" on the Text Import window,
o Or use =VALUE() to convert the text values to dates after import. 
(Note that the VALUE() function will not affect any genuine dates, so 
can handle mixed sets of data.)

> The problem is the same for directly reading a CSV file.

Not for most users, I think ...

> When I add the bank items into a point in the ledger near the 
> current time there seems to be no way to ask for a sort that works 
> only for selected rows.

You define which items you want to add in formulae, not by selecting 
rows. And you certainly can sort selected rows.

> OpenCalc needs to have a way to accept dates, when explicitly told, 
> from the MM/DD/YYYY stuff that banks use.

Ditch OpenCalc. Use LibreOffice Calc - or even OpenOffice Calc - both 
of which do this easily.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker


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