Bug 114249 - FILEOPEN, UI: "Text Import" dialog: option to treat every column as "text"
Summary: FILEOPEN, UI: "Text Import" dialog: option to treat every column as "text"
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Calc (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
5.4.3.2 release
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2017-12-04 22:45 UTC by clemty
Modified: 2018-05-18 15:43 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.
Description clemty 2017-12-04 22:45:36 UTC
Description:
By default, importing text into calc imports everything column as 'standard'; this may lead to unintended results[1]. A firsthand example is pasting barcodes (i.e. text strings) which begin with leading zeroes - calc by default treats these as numbers.

[1]: https://science.slashdot.org/story/16/08/23/2222258/20-of-scientific-papers-on-genes-contain-conversion-errors-caused-by-excel-says-report

Steps to Reproduce:
1. paste/open csv data with leading zeroes (e.g. "00001")
2. in the import dialog, leave column type as "standard"
3. (note that the data is still presented as "00001" in the preview)
4. click ok
5. input gets converted to "1"

Actual Results:  
input gets changed to number (e.g. "1")

Expected Results:
depending on task, "00001" may be intended


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: Yes


OpenGL enabled: Yes

Additional Info:
I suggest a checkbox with text like "treat all input as text", which disables/greys out the "column type" dropdown, and changes all column types to "text" - leaving that box checked should make it much harder to shoot oneself in the foot by accidentally converting strings to numbers/dates


User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
Comment 1 Buovjaga 2017-12-13 17:26:38 UTC
We really don't want to clutter the interface with options for various use cases.

Currently, you can select all the columns by clicking on the empty square at the left side of the column headers. Then you can change the type for all of them at once.

I won't consult the design team as I assume they will favour closing this request.