[Tfug] Turning off OOo auto-format?

[Claude Rubinson]

On Tue, Sep 02, 2008 at 10:09:23PM -0700, Paul Scott wrote:
> Claude Rubinson wrote:
> > That's not what I want either.  Besides the fact that that info is
> > saved with the document, that would render, e.g., Figure "1.9" as
> > "1.90".  Which is, again, wrong.  What I'm looking to do is tell OOo
> > to format everything as text unless I explicitly state otherwise.
> >   
> Do a Ctrl-A.  Select Format/Cells/Numbers/Text.  Then format any other
> ranges the way you want them.

That's not the problem.  The problem is that when I open a text
document with OOo, it drops all trailing zeros from any field that it
thinks is numeric.  I want OOo (or any app that'll do that job) to
open text documents without mangling what's already there.

What I just realized is that, when opening a delimited text file, Calc
allows you to specify the column types.  By specifying all columns as
text, I can achieve what I need.  But it's ugly and leaves double
quotes around every field when I resave.

So that shifts the question - are there any spreadsheet (or
spreadsheet-like) apps that will act on plain text files without
mangling them?  I would guess that the answer is no, since one of
points of spreadsheets are the embedded formulas, etc.  I guess what
I'm really looking for is a simple way of entering and maintaining
(including sorting, etc) columnar data.  (An emacs mode with
spreadsheet-like features such as freeze would fit what I'm talking
about.)

Claude