On 13/03/18 02:49 PM, Ben Caradoc-Davies wrote:
I also long avoided the complexity of LibreOffice Calc, but a modest investment of time has left me satisfied with the results. Things I like: - Flexible CSV import/export. I like to manipulate CSV files with grep, perl, and geany, and then import into Calc. Nothing is quicker than Ctrl-D in a text editor for deleting unwanted rows. I also use a regex to convert all dates to (for example) ISO 8601 here as fixing date values in Calc can be painful (but formatting is easy with Ctrl-1). Then CSV import to slurp it into Calc, delete unwanted columns, and copy and paste into the target sheet.
The nice thing for me is that when you import a CSV file, LibreOffice Calc sizes each column according to the width of the data. Unlike Excel, you don't have to manually invoke the hilariously-titled "auto-format" feature to set the column widths to something reasonable.
Speaking of ISO 8601, I'm currently in the process of converting all our systems to use it in place of other date formats such as yyyy/mm/dd. Excel is quite adamant about converting anything that looks remotely like a date into mm/dd/yyyy format, but ISO 8601 is apparently beyond what its feeble mind can handle, and Excel leaves it alone.
A lot of my programming effort goes toward "Excel-proofing" my data. -- cgibbs@surfnaked.ca (Charlie Gibbs)