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Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:36:59 -0500
From: Andrew Douglas Pitonyak <andrew@pitonyak.org>
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To: dev@openoffice.apache.org
CC: kieth lovell <m3ojh@yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: Re: (old) New feature/option to prevent autodata alterations in calc
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Remember, that anything that begins as a number, Calc tries to interpret 
as a number rather than text. For most users, this is exactly what you 
want most of the time. For a few unlucky people (like you), their 
average use case is different than others, and you do not want that. It 
is odd that you can turn this stuff off in a text table, but I am unsure 
how to do so in a Calc document unless........

Read this, it will give you some ideas.

http://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=57276

Sounds like setting the default style to be text will solve your 
problems; maybe.

On 01/06/2013 11:56 PM, kieth lovell wrote:
> My name is kiet lovell,
> I am an serial small scale entrepeneur, and I like to do my business plans (as well as everything else) in spreadsheets.
>
> For years I have suffered as
> 	1. numbers are turned to dates
>
> 	2. phone numbers are altered
>
> 	3. lower case data is changed to identical higher case data (eg: data to DATA(when DATA is a separate piece of data that i typed than the lower case))
>
> 	4. If I type Scone then i can not write s, sc, sco, or scon in the same field without my data being altered to the full word scone.
>
>
> There is no solution to this in the options for calc.
> Please do not reference selecting every cell as text or another type of data as it only stops certain types of alterations.
>
> What needs to be done is that there needs to be an option to turn off all autodata transformations.
>
> It should be in tools>options>openoffice.org calc>general>input settings
>
> Thank you in advance
> Kiet Lovell
>
> The important part of the message is the piece above, the following are just my views/or justifications.
>
> I am sending this to the development mailing group as this issue has been complained about by at least hundreds of users for several years without solution.
>
>
> If you do not think it is a big problem then please google any of the following phrases:
>
> Office keeps changing numbers to dates
> Turn off autodata in calc
> Prevent openoffice changing my data
> etc.
>
> I have spent weeks of my life trying to fix this problem to no avail.
> The only way i can use calc is to change the data such as putting letters with phone numbers and when unable to input the correct data, by inputting slightly wrong data so that it isn't changed to a different value.
>
> Almost all users of calc use it for home finance or education or business purposes, and all of these can be badly affected by unsanctioned changes to data.
>
> Microsoft office in it's latest reincarnation is unusable for a professional and libre office has the same problem as openoffice.
>
> If you the developers of open office cannot fix this then i will either:
> 	* continue to suffer in relative silence
> or less likely
> 	* spend 6 months learning to program and produce my own software that i will charge for.
> or probably
>
> 	* downgrade to an efficient OS like windows 3.1 when computers were made for saving time and money, not costing you it

-- 
Andrew Pitonyak
My Macro Document: http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.odt
Info:  http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php