[Solved] Paste page of text into a cell

[unclebirt]

hi,

I want to be able to paste text, say it is the text from a page of a book that i am writing, it is in simple text format, nothing fancy.

I want a cell to be a receptacle for that page of text.

I am not interested in being able to read the text while it is in the cell, and i am not carrying out any manipulation or interaction with that text
while it is in the cell.

I just want to be able to go to a cell and retrieve the text and then copy it elsewhere in the same format that i pasted it into the cell

thanks,
birt

[robleyd]

Does the normal process to copy and paste not do what you want? If not, what is not happening as you want it to?

Perhaps you need to Paste Special as unformatted text.

Note that Calc is quite possibly not the ideal tool for whatever you are trying to achieve.

[karolus]

Hallo

double-click the cell before pasting (<ctrl><v>)

[unclebirt]

Thanks for the reply, i understand about the last comment, if Calc can not do it i will look elsewhere.

Let's say i have the following text document

Test1.txt

(9 Bytes) Downloaded 108 times

just 2 lines - i think it is the inherent return character that is causing the problem

In a spreadsheet i have just two columns and 2 rows

Example.ods

(8.25 KiB) Downloaded 103 times

at the moment column B is empty

i want to be able to copy the information held in the text document into Cell B1
and only cell B1

Instead this is what i get :

Example2.ods

(8.48 KiB) Downloaded 101 times

when i copy - the word 'Page' is going into cell B1 and the word 'One' is going into cell B2,
is there anyway of saying that i want all of the text to go into cell B1 ?

i see that there is the option of shrinking the text to fit the cell size, once the problem of getting all the text into just one cell is fixed.

If i can not use Calc what other option is there ?

I will have about 1000 rows, and they need to be sorted

thanks,
Birt

[unclebirt]

Hi - yes the double click works
great
thanks for that
Birt

[robleyd]

This seems rather like an XY Problem. What is the actual problem, that you have decided can be solved by storing potentially large text strings in Calc? Perhaps we can offer an alternative strategy.

[RoryOF]

Are you intending to sort on the text content of each "page", or on a "key" (such as a title or assigned key phrase) describing each page?

You say "a book you are writing". How is such book subdivided - each page in a frame or container of some sort, or each page a keyword and text (as in a dictionary). More information would be helpful.

[unclebirt]

Hello,

Thanks for the further two replies.

The 'double-click the cell before pasting' technique works just fine, i can paste the page of text into the cell, which has had the format set
to TEXT and 'Shrink to fit cell size'
and then copy the text from the cell back into a Text document - without any difference to the original text before pasting into the cell.

The reason for me wanting to do this is that the TEXT which is different in each case is associated with the DATA in the column beside it, in
the same row.

Now and in the future i want to carry out various sort and manipulations on that item of DATA,
and wherever that DATA ends up i then want to go to the TEXT cell associated with that DATA and retrieve the text.

When i first tried this (without the double click) because the text had return characters embedded in it - i am assuming that
the pasting caused the spreadsheet to put the text on many lines as in the example i provided.

thanks for the help,
birt

[robleyd]

This is the sort of task for which databases are best suited.

[RoryOF]

I agree that a database is the ideal tool for this, but has a steep learning curve.

Using Calc you now have a name column and a text column. If for some reason the link between the name cell and its text cell is broken (perhaps by a wrongly specified Sort) your dateset is damaged, perhaps beyond easy recovery.

You might consider (mis-)using Impress, which allows one name each slide, which would be a container for your text. Using Impress, I don't think one can sort on the slide names, which may be a major consideration for you.

In Writer you might select each text, then /Insert /Section, giving the Section the appropriate name; such names are now linked to their Section. Once again, I don't think there is a Sort mechanism easily applicable to the Section names, although such Sections can be dragged and dropped to re-order them, using Navigator.

Alternately, in Writer, If you defined each text to be a "Chapter", using the appropriate Heading structures of Writer, you might re-arrange Chapters by drag and drop in Navigator (see Help under outlines;arranging chapters).