Saving Calc files as tab delimited

[normantomalin]

Welcome beginner. Please answer all of the questions below which may provide information necessary to answer your question.
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Which version of OpenOffice.org are you using? 2.3.1
What Operating System (version) are you using? Vista HOme
What is your question or comment? I'm new to OO and need to save a spreadsheet file as a tab delimited file. In Excel I "Save As" the xls file as a (tab delimited) txt file. How is this accomplished in Open Office?

[squenson]

normantomalin,

Welcome to the forum! To save a file with tab delimited, use Save As, select Text (CSV) and click the Edit box:

f1.PNG (4.51 KiB) Viewed 14292 times

Then in the new window, select the {tab} option:

[cmikal]

In the example screen shot you show a very simple file name (ttt). OK.....no problem....but what if you already have MANY files already saved on your computer and those files all have long, complicated names ending in a TXT extension, and you want to replace one of them with the document you are now editing? What then? Files with the TXT extension do not appear in the dialog box so that you can select it from a list, and you cant leave the file name empty, so you are stuck.

If you dont understand the dilemma, here is the scenario:
We have many relatively small tab delimited documents that get updated or completely changed every day (ie each document may be 90% to 100% different after each save. Each document MUST be saved with the EXACT correct file name, otherwise our computer system wont recognize the file as valid and reject it. Each document may start out as a blank or new-never-before-saved document (ie it is not guaranteed that the original document will be opened, edited, then resaved). So you create/edit a blank document that needs to be saved as Tr5HIl1MMnmD3xXssAsS-T_Q-ys0.txt.

Go ahead. Try it. See how far you get.

Why can't there just be a "save as TAB delimited"? To not have that option, IMHO, is just plain stupid.

[Villeroy]

Turn off "Automatic file name extension" and save with any suffix or none.

[fst]

Hi,

have you tried to put '*.txt' (without the quotes) into the filename field and pressed the Enter Key ?

No ?

So try it and your problem is solved.

To have an extra filter option for an somewhat seldome used option (for the world not yours!) in an currently overloaded Filter box is counter productive and therefore not done.

frank

[MARIO REIS]

Please

Where can i report a bug? I strongly beleave i found a bug savig calc files as tab delimited(1.º as CSV then separator {Tab} then fixed column) ;
The result is a file/columns with 1 more byte then it should be.
Can any one help?
Thanks.

[squenson]

You can report a bug at http://qa.openoffice.org. You need to register (it's free!) in order to report a bug. Check whether it doesn't already exist.

[huasonshine]

I tried several times to save from calc to .txt & .csv maybe I'm tired and frustrated but when I reopened to check spacing, it was garbled code. (blonde geek-speak).
yes, I have tried unchecking the auto ext and typing in my own suffix. I finally gave up and pasted (special) the unformatted text into an .odt; checked spacing, and then pasted into notepad. The long way around but hey, it worked and ultimately it transferred properly to my online address book at SOC (which was the point) The odd thing was, that it was inconsistant in the text formatting (adding "quotes" for delimited text) I would love to get feed-back on what causes that. The short cuts are not worth as much if you have to correct 25% of the text to use it, even so it was still faster than re-typng all of the addresses into the individual fields.

[Villeroy]

csv is not a file format. It is mere convention. There are thousands of valid csv variants and quoted text is pretty much standard. Whatever "SOC" means, if it processes text tables should be able to import any flavour of csv you throw at it.
Is there any reason why you load text data into a numeric calculation program? I know that virtually everybody does that since decades with always the same problems since decades. Spreadsheets are not particularly useful as text editors.
http://csved.sjfrancke.nl/ is a text editor for text tables.