Opening TSV files in a speadsheet in OpenOffice.org

[Bogdan Petrenko]

My Open office experience has been wonderful, except one small annoying thing: I can't open tsv Microsoft files as an Open Office spreadsheet, and I already uninstalled Microsoft Office from my computers. The way around it is clumsy: open the tsv file in a word processor, and then keep copying and pasting the items in the spreadsheet one at a time. I will greatly appreciate any advice here.

Thanks,
Bogdan Petrenko

[Hagar Delest]

Does it help: [Solved] Opening a text file in Calc?
TSV is the equivalent of CSV so it should be the same.

Thanks to add '[Solved]' at beginning of your first post title (edit button) if your issue has been fixed.

NB: moved your thread in the Calc forum.

[sourabha4u]

But it is not opening in Open Office.
TSV is opening in Windows- MS Excel but I m using Ubuntu-Open Office 3.1 it is not opening.

[Qusai]

to open a tsv Microsoft files as an Open Office spreadsheet, you need to change the tsv to csv. If you use Ubuntu, right-click on Rename... and change it to csv

[Villeroy]

You can open any file with any program . Right-click>Open With... choose /usr/bin/soffice or oocalc (depends on how calc is linked in your /usr/bin/), check option "always use this program".

Text tables (csv, tsv, whatever) are database tables. You can collect similar files in one directory and access all the files easily through OOo Base.

[sync0x]

to open a tsv Microsoft files as an Open Office spreadsheet, you need to change the tsv to csv. If you use Ubuntu, right-click on Rename... and change it to csv

This issue is worth revisiting. For what reason is OpenOffice unable to determine Calc is the correct application with which to open tab-separated-values files? By convention TSV is for spreadsheets while TXT is for documents. I do not wish to rename my own tab-separated-values files to use the comma-separated-values extension because it is important for my own software to know how to treat the expected presence or absence of a comma in each format. This is one feature in addition to the Visual Basic for Applications object model that Microsoft's own Office suite still has supremacy over.

[Villeroy]

With whatever file name extension, right-click>Open With... OpenOffice Calc.

-- 2nd option: Open the office suite to the welcome screen side-by-side with your file manager and drag the file icon into the welcome screen. In case of a tsv extension, LibreOffice (not OpenOffice) loads the file into a spreadsheet.

-- 3rd option: menu:File>Open...
FileType: "Text (*.csv;*.txt)" [among the spreadsheet file formats]. Even if the file name is invisible because its extension does not match the filter, you can type its name into the name box. The auto-complete feature of that box will match even a hidden file.

If it opens with Writer, copy all (Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C) and paste-special as "unformatted text" into Calc (Ctrl+Shift+V)

https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/li ... penoffice/

[sync0x]

...

-- 3rd option: menu:File>Open...
FileType: "Text (*.csv;*.txt)" [among the spreadsheet file formats]. Even if the file name is invisible because its extension does not match the filter, you can type its name into the name box. The auto-complete feature of that box will match even a hidden file.

If it opens with Writer, copy all (Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C) and paste-special as "unformatted text" into Calc (Ctrl+Shift+V)

https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/li ... penoffice/

Opening a data-bearing TSV in the literate-paragraph-editing Writer in preparation for a memory hungry clipboard transfer process, rather than Calc's fit-for-purpose Import formatting dialog, is about as close to a bug as one can get in my opinion. Given that the software is open source, I would be interested in tracing all subroutines where the monolithic soffice binary makes its decision as to which component application to hand over an open file request to. This includes the Open File dialog. When changing the file type dropdown at the lower-right to "Spreadsheets," all .TSV files disappear from view. In the same dialog on OO for Windows, the end of the list of associated extensions for spreadsheets simply reads ";*.csv" rather than ";*.csv;*.tsv" as it should, which would be the first step in resolving this issue.

[RusselB]

If you want to go through the source code for OpenOffice and find the appropriate sections (I pluralized that on purpose, as I doubt it will be in just one area), you can find more information about obtaining the source code at https://github.com/apache/openoffice

[Villeroy]

Opening a data-bearing TSV in the literate-paragraph-editing Writer in preparation for a memory hungry clipboard transfer process, rather than Calc's fit-for-purpose Import formatting dialog, is about as close to a bug as one can get in my opinion.

OpenOffice has died several years ago. Apart from minuscule yearly bug fixes there is no development anymore. Since 2011 LibreOffice is the actively developed successor to OpenOffice. Apart from this particular issue with *.tsv, there are thousands of other things that have been fixed, improved and sometimes just changed. LO opens plain text files with *.tsv suffix with Calc.