closest thing I found is talking about spanned cells - I don't know about spanned cells. When I save as csv file fixed width, It saves what is shown on screen, It does not matter what is in the cell, 5 chars or 30 chars if there are 10 chars on the screen, thats all that will export, it truncates the rest of the longer cell or pads the shorter cell to match what is shown on the screen, if I have a cell with 30 chars in it and drag the cell on screen wider it will pad the 30 char with spaces on export, If I drag the cell narrower it will truncate chars that are not shown on screen during export. I don't think it should ever truncate a cell, but should pad shorter cells to match the longest cell in each column. So if cell A1 is 5 chars and cell B1 is 20 chars and cell C1 is 10 chars on save it should set column 1 to 20 chars and pad A1 and C1 with spaces to match the width of 20 chars as in B1. I hope this is enough info.
As you can see in the help: " Fixed column width Exports all data fields with a fixed width. • The width of a data field in the exported text file is set to the current width of the corresponding column. • Values are exported in the format as currently seen in the cell. • If a value is longer than the fixed column width, it will be exported as a ### string. • If a text string is longer than the fixed column width, it will be truncated at the end. • The alignment Left, Centered, and Right will be simulated by inserted blanks. " For me there is not a bug, it does as designed.
If You say so, but there is no way to drag the Column width on screen to exactly 30 chars wide in one column and 15 chars wide in the the next column and so on. And I have no way to know the width of a column in advance to exporting unless I want to count the chars in every row of every column before saving the file. Some files have over 125,000 rows in them, I am working on a small file now that has 47,890 rows and I do not know what the widest cell is in each column, Plus other spreadsheets I've use have not done this, They determine the widest cell and pad the other cells to match, Off to find another way to do this. Thanks
Oh, and Like I said in the original post it does not output ###, it truncates the cell and drops all chars not shown on screen. Thanks
Using a monospaced font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monospaced_typefaces should solve the issue, so it allows to see how many characters keeps in the cell. ### it's for numeric values no for text like the help explain.
Sorry to be a bother, But any program that allows someone to loose data (especially without a warning), be it buy design or otherwise, is in my option a bug. I spent the weekend converting 30 some-odd files before I noticed that this was happening, I just assumed the program would have warned me if I was about too truncate some fields and loose data, (my bad). To a layperson like me, "fixed column width" says the column should be "22" chars wide(regardless of the type of font used), not 22 pixels wide(as in saving a view of whats on the screen), The way this is working now, it does not make any difference if I used a fixed font (yes, I did try it - and same thing) or any other font, I still would have to scroll through the entire file and see if I could find any of those little red arrows in any of the cells that tells me my the column is too narrow for the info to fit in the cell, (I have just over two million rows to convert in a whole bunch of smaller files). I am almost positive that the last time I had to do this it worked as I would expect, but that was several years back, (somewhere around ubuntu8 or maybe ubuntu10 and open-office was what was included in the distro. Sorry for the rant, I don't mean to be a pest. I would like to put in for a feature request...blablabla Thanks,
Sorry but there a some things that are in relation in to know how to use the program. After set up a monospace font, for setup with columns all at once, click on the square upper number row 1 and left column A, then right-click on a column head and select optimal with. I don't think OpenOffice does this in a different way. Fixed width it's not the better way to save as csv, except it is to be imported with other program needing that, but if so you need to set up the columns width, and the text not keeping on the cell width will be lost.