[Gllug] Gnumeric Problem

[Justin Perreault]

On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 23:04 +0100, Mick Farmer wrote:
> I'm having problems with an Excel spreadsheet in both
> OpenOffice.org and Gnumeric.

Not being flame-ist I would guess that the problem is you're using
Excel. I have found that many times when I have used MS-Office
applications they add formatting code which seems to have no benefit
except to MS-Office.

You might be better off saving the spread sheet as a delimited text file
before bringing it over to any other program. I find this prevents the
garbage from being included in a file. Another way to strip the excess
is to copy to a program that discards all but the text, in this case
though that will likely create more problems than are worth it.

If you have formulas that you want to survive I suggest ensuring you
save them as formulas and not as values.

> When I open the spreadsheet in OpenOffice.org it displays a
> sheet with 32,000 rows with my data, the first 54 rows, as
> red lines (which may be from spellcheck as many of the cells
> are people's initials), but I can see their contents in the
> edit box.
> 
> When I open the spreadsheet in Gnumeric, many of the cells
> are empty, but I can see their contents in the edit box.

These two issues can be related to the excess coding that I mention
above. More specifically I would guess that there is excess space, tabs,
CR, horizontal justification, vertical justification or any combination
of these and possibly ones I haven't listed.

If the file is prepared by someone else I would recommend just
requesting they send it as delimited text file to you. It would be a
safest option choice for preserving data imo.

(If getting a delimited file choose a delimiter that is not in use in
your data ie # & or $. I wonder if a combo is possible with excel %&
should be fairly rare I would expect.)

HTH
Justin

-- 
If you are an adult, you can choose to act like a child. If you do not
accept being an adult, you are only a child. -JJJ

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