(no subject)

[naath]

Weirdest Bug -

Using Open Office, open a new spreadsheet. In cell A1 type 'ID', in cell B1 type 'Pre' (no quotes). Save as a .csv using ; as a separator. Now open the resulting .csv file using Open Office. If you are *me* then this just straight-up doesn't work - you get a blank .csv file. Loads of *other* text works; It seems to be only if I have a word starting with P in B1 and NOT in A1. Also it works if I use , as a separator (but the bloody file is full of ,s maybe I need to trust the quoting more)?

ALSO annoyingly if a cell contents is '.' it reads (in OO) as '0' (it's not, if I read the text file it has '.'). Does not happen if cell contents is '.,.' or other '.' containing strings.

Comments

[tigerfort]

To the second point: Ah, yes. The fun times I had, explaining that (in an editing context) coding empty cells, cells containing zeros, and cells with dashes, a single ".", or some other piece of punctuation as identical "null" cells was absolutely disasterous. The annoying thing was that it took me less than five minutes to find a real example of a table that used "0", "-", and an empty cell for three different things, but people were still arguing that such a thing couldn't possibly exist much later on....

[naath]

So it's an *intentional* mis-feature? Wow. Is it not obvious that if I type in *different things* I expect *different things* to show up?

[tigerfort]

I don't know about the specific case of Libre Office*, but certainly some (people and) bits of software do it deliberately, yes.

*but my original comment does rather give that impression, doesn't it. Sorry for the mislead!

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Seems to behave OK in LibreOffice.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Not in my LibreOffice it doesn't... 3.5.4.2

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I tested with 4.2.8.2.
Yours looks like Debian wheezy's LibreOffice. wheezy-backports has 4.3.3; so does jessie. If you plan to upgrade to jessie soon, that might fix it; if not installing the version from wheezy-backports might do the job.