Description: While working on COBOL files, sometimes we need to manipulate them on local computers. It would be a nice improvement if you could take a COBOL Copybook (a construct that specifies the fields on a dataset a COBOL program will manipulate) and use it to format fields to be imported from a positional text field Steps to Reproduce: Now: 1. Take a positional file 2. Open it on Calc as a Comma-Separated file 3. Choose Fixed-Length 4. Split manually the file before importing The suggestions: 1. Take a positional file 2. Open it on Calc as a Comma-Separated file 3. Click a Load Template File 4. Select the Copybook 5. Look and confirm if the fields are correctly split (and signed and decimal-pointed) according the COBOL Copybook Actual Results: It imports normally Expected Results: It imports normally Reproducible: Always User Profile Reset: Yes OpenGL enabled: Yes Additional Info: Version: 7.0.0.3 Build ID: 8061b3e9204bef6b321a21033174034a5e2ea88e Threads da CPU: 4; SO: Linux 5.4; Realizador da interface: padrão; VCL: kf5 Locale: pt-BR (pt_BR.UTF-8); Interface: pt-BR Calc: threaded
I wonder how much use there is for this feature. I am adding keyword needsUXEval. A brief glance at RecordEditor <https://sourceforge.net/projects/record-editor/> hints that it will do the job of converting to csv. In the absence of a great demand for an integrated interface, an external tool to do part of the job might be good enough. Import of fixed-width records feels to me (in some ill-defined) way to fit better with Base than with Calc. Here again there are external tools.
I second Terrence's hesitation. Either use a 3rd party tool or use a macro (and share it on the extensions site) to make your workflow more comfortable. It's quite a corner case as COBOL is not widely used.