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I am trying to find apostrophes in a document. LO can find all of them in some documents, but not others. I am suspecting that the issue is that some apostrophes are considered going straight up and down, and others leaning to one side. In at least some of the files that LO does not see the apostrophe, I scroll down and see it in the text of the file itself.

What I am doing---I hit Ctrl+F to find an apostrophe, but LO tells me Search Key Not Found. Even so, I can scroll down and view the apostrophes in the file itself.

Now this only happens on occasion--LO appears to be working properly, as I can find all the apostrophes in certain files, but not others, which leads me to suspect there is more than one type of apostrophe, but LO is only seeing one type.

Is there something I can do to get LO to find them all? Or is the solution something else?

How do the apostrophes get into the cells? You import text files, right?

The language settings are English(USA) because there are numerals with "$" and possibly M/D/Y dates.
Always check "Detect special numbers" (except very rare cases)

Thanks, but I didn't understand your reply. I have downloaded text files, and was trying to use Ctrl+F or Ctrl+H to find these apostrophes.

I did a little poking around the interwebs and figured out what to do. Indeed there are a few different apostrophes, each with Unicode numbers. The one that LO was seeing (and making, when I hit the apostrophe just to the left of the Enter key in my US English Keyboard) was formed by typing in 0027+Alt+x (that is, two zeros, not the letter "o").

In order to find the other apostrophes, I had to type in another code--00219 (and then Atl+x). This produced a slightly different apostrophe. I then copied this apostrophe, and pasted it into the Ctrl+H field, and LO found it in all of those other documents (that had apostrophes, which LO couldn't see earlier).

Well problem solved. At least now, in addition to finding apostrophes, I know how to enter Unicode text numbers. Didn't know how to do that before.

EDIT: For what its worth, there are also two other apostrophes (if in fact that is the name for these signs)--formed by entering the numbers 2018 and 201B, instead of 0027/2019. You can see this page if you are interested: http://snowball.tartarus.org/texts/apostrophe.html

I am suspecting that the issue is that some apostrophes are considered going straight up and down, and others leaning to one side. In at least some of the files that LO does not see the apostrophe, I scroll down and see it in the text of the file itself.

Yes, there are different Quotation mark and Apostrophe characters. You must search an replace them one by one.


„Hungarian quotation”


“English quotation”
‘English apostrophe’

"Computer (ASCII) quotation"
'Computer (ASCII) apostrophe'

How can we know without having the same file as you have? Simply upload (some part of) your file.
When you search this forum (or any other spreadsheet forum for that matter) for "apostrophe" you find hundreds of topics about a special apostrophe related to importing text data but barely one topic about typographic quotes.