Re: text mode columns strip leading "+"?

["Uri David Akavia" <uridavid akavia gmail com>]

I agree that there ought to be a "Completely No interpretation" option
somewhere in the Text import dialog.
For example, I'm a biologist which deals with Bioinformatic info.
Some genes have a symbol (or ID) that can be interpreted by Gnumeric,
for example Sep-06. An option to have this strictly be text (and/or
automagically adding the ') would be very useful, especially since I
may deal with files that have thousands of lines - adding the ' by a
script before import may cause problems with other programs that
process these files (even if Gnumeric will export without the ', I
might need to reprocess the original files).

Yours,

Uri David

On 9/21/06, Thomas Mellman <thomas mellman net> wrote:
>  Jody Goldberg wrote:
>  On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 10:30:29AM +0200, Thomas Mellman wrote:
>
>
>  But I was surprised when I tried to load my cell-phone phone book into
> it, and the "text"-mode column stripped the leading "+" from the numbers.
>
> Can somebody tell me how to really turn off interpretation - or give me
> a pointer where in the code I can change it?
>
>  Put a leading single quote to avoid interpreting them as an
> expression.
>
>  '+12345
>
>
>
>
>  Yes, I can do that.  Somebody pointed that out. My phone won't take that
> when I want to ship it back, however.  I'll have to write something in perl
> to fix it up first.
>
>  I've been shown why that is perfectly logical behavior, software
> architecture-wise.  I think, however, that it's actually a user-interface
> bug.
>
>  Ideally, something like adding a checkbox to re-interpret existing data
> could be added to the format-cells context-specific-dialog.  Or, simpler, a
> configuration parameter (preference) could specify that default text columns
> are text, and not general.  Other approaches may be even better.  I think
> conceptionally something is not quite right here, in this tool that is
> perfect in so many other ways.
>
>  I hope I have the time to get gnumeric built (tools based on the gnu
> libraries are terribly complicated to build, with their very fussy configure
> scripts), then perhaps I can put my money where my mouth is.
>
>  --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Thomas Mellman Tel: +49/8233/389-037
>
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