Is there a way to correct the lack of leading zeros?
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Edit: Changed subject, was Cannot sort by Date because the data didn't include leading zeros.. help? Make your post understandable by others
-- MrProgrammer, forum moderator
Last edited by MrProgrammer on Thu Mar 28, 2024 5:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Your dates and your numbers have entered the cells as text and are being sorted alphabetically. How is the data being entered into Calc?
OpenOffice 4.1 on Windows 10 and Linux Mint
If your question is answered, please go to your first post, select the Edit button, and add [Solved] to the beginning of the title.
FJCC wrote: ↑Sun Mar 24, 2024 12:55 am
Your dates and your numbers have entered the cells as text and are being sorted alphabetically. How is the data being entered into Calc?
It was a .csv file provided by Paypal that I imported.
I've merged your questions as they are both the same problem; your "dates" are in fact stored as text and so are the "numbers" in your second post. You caa use Ctrl+F8 or View | Value Highlighting to confirm this. Text cells are formatted in black, formulae in green, and number cells in blue, no matter how their display is formatted.
[Tutorial] Text to Columns may help you with a fix. If the data was imported from e.g. a CSV file, make sure in future you check the option Detect Special Numbers.
Cheers
David
OS - Slackware 15 64 bit
Apache OpenOffice 4.1.15
LibreOffice 24.2.2.2; SlackBuild for 24.2.2 by Eric Hameleers
In the Text Import dialog that you should get as part of importing a csv file, there is a table at the bottom showing a few rows of data and the data type under which they will be imported. The default type is Standard. Right click on the word standard and pick something appropriate for the column. Your date column should work with the mdy setting and your numbers should work with US English.
And, as robleyd said, click Detect Special Numbers as a matter of course.
OpenOffice 4.1 on Windows 10 and Linux Mint
If your question is answered, please go to your first post, select the Edit button, and add [Solved] to the beginning of the title.
FJCC wrote: ↑Sun Mar 24, 2024 2:15 am
In the Text Import dialog that you should get as part of importing a csv file, there is a table at the bottom showing a few rows of data and the data type under which they will be imported. The default type is Standard. Right click on the word standard and pick something appropriate for the column. Your date column should work with the mdy setting and your numbers should work with US English.
And, as robleyd said, click Detect Special Numbers as a matter of course.
Thank you for the help..
I ended up using Microsoft Excel and when I imported the csv data it immediately recognized that there was numerical data entered as text (thanks Paypal geniuses!) and asked if I wanted them converted before importing the data.
It seems that Open office could use some help screens like that..!