Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Apostrophe prepended to MM/DD/YYYY

At 10:17 17/10/2016 -0400, Charles Marcus wrote:
> On 10/15/2016 10:02 PM, Brian Barker wrote:
> > At 18:10 11/10/2016 +0100, Tom Davies wrote:
> > > Can find&replace get rid of the ' marks to make the values revert 
> > > to 'numbers/dates' rather than being forced into being text?
> >
> > No.
>
> This claims otherwise:
> http://www.ryananddebi.com/2009/11/29/remove-apostrophes-before-numbers-in-openoffice-calc/

Er, yes and no. I was replying, of course, to the suggestion that the 
apostrophes themselves could be searched for and replaced. They 
cannot, since they simply do not exist in the cell data. It's 
important that readers are not confused by the suggestion that they can.

But the web site offers a neat trick, if over-complicated by the 
presence of the circumflex, which unnecessarily locks the search to 
the beginning of the cell text. All that seems to be necessary is to 
search for "." and replace with "&". The process presumably relies on 
Calc's reinterpreting the values as it replaces them - now seeing 
them as numbers, just as it would if they were typed afresh.

In any case, Jean-Francois Nifenecker (who also answered "Nope" to 
the above suggestion) offered a technique using Data | Text to 
Columns... which was superior to my contribution.

Brian Barker  


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