Comments on: remove apostrophes before numbers in OpenOffice Calc

By: NJBILLT

NJBILLT — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:06:39 +0000

This might help someone too. I saw someone asking about if it’s AFTER the text. Well, I copied my credit card into calc and one column wouldn’t add. So I figured out that it’s text too just like the above problem, but in my case, no apostrophe. It’s a SPACE, and it’s AFTER the numbers, not before, so it’s not so easy to find. Solution: use find and replace. COPY the space from calc, and replace it with a 0 (zero) Now it will format like numbers. If you’re formatted for 2 decimal points, you won’t even see the extra 0 you added.

By: nambot

nambot — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 23:40:20 +0000

OMG. I love you. You just saved me hours of time. Thanks!

By: Thomas B. Higgins

Thomas B. Higgins — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:21:41 +0000

Ryan, Thank you very much for this. The last time I had this problem and searched for a solution I found nothing. Your clear, well illustrated advice makes the world a better place.

By: james breiner

james breiner — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 21:25:44 +0000

You people are awesome. Thank you. This saved me a ton of work.

By: Michael S>

Michael S> — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 01:04:10 +0000

It is really infuriating how Calc simply ignores the column or cell properties (me forcing it to be ciphers or valuta) and keeps quoting certain numbers like 3.59
–> ’3.59 but (most) others in the same column as ciphers the way I wanted them. Manually removing that heinous ‘ will turn 3.59 into 21610,00!!!! Even when carefully removing all digits, pasting them in notepad and pasting etc. won’t get rid of the %##%@! quotes so my calculations simply return 0. It really defies the whole purpose of Open Office if it is so fundamentally messing up in one of the bare essentials of a spreadsheet program. Why this ’3.59 and ’10.00 became to be text in stead of ciphers I’ll never know because the original CSV that was imported did not contain any aberrations in that column. Obviously it is an error in the import logarithms used and probably would qualify as ‘bugz’. Anyway, thanks for the tips that I have found here, it has indeed cleared those ridiculous (‘random’) quotes!!! I am glad that I did not have to waste hours on finding a how to. For your information my search engine query was: “open office how to delete quoted values”

By: Waldir

Waldir — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 21:37:30 +0000

You’re the man, Ryan! Saved me quite a few hours of monkey work. Thanks!

By: Scott

Scott — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 19:33:55 +0000

Thank you so much! This was driving me crazy!

By: Diane

Diane — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:10:05 +0000

This should be part of the FAQs on OpenOffice’s website.
Amazing. I consider myself a pretty good Googler / help file searcher. Just lucky my Google Fu turned up your site as the OpenOffice site and help files were no help.

Thank you so much for your very clear instructions! Two year old post and it still applies.

By: Rob

Rob — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 09:51:06 +0000

You are awesome. Saved me forever.

By: Zdenek

Zdenek — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 17:13:29 +0000

Hey! This helped me a lot!
My document has 850.000 lines with these invisible apostrophs.

Thank you.