Re: text mode columns strip leading "+"?

[Thomas Mellman <thomas mellman net>]

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

                    Creative Telcom Solutions

mellman creative-telcom-solutions de         Fax: +49/1212-5-115-48-103
                                             Mob: +49/174/393-6795