Re: Simple spreadsheet program.
On Tue 13 Mar 2018 at 22:00:00 (-0700), Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> 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.
I was unaware that in Excel you couldn't use the usual method which
I gave (for heights rather than widths, but it's the same) in
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2018/01/msg00264.html
and is used by both gnumeric and calc.
> 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.
But used as an entry format for dates and times, doesn't that mean
you're entering strings, which then can't be used in calculations?
For me, the problem with ISO 8601 as a display format is losing the
month names, so I use formats like yyyy-mmm-dd hh:mm for displaying
columns containing timestamps. With CSV export, gnumeric turns such
dates into yyyy/mm/dd which can be reimported elsewhere.
Cheers,
David.
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