Description: Is it feasible to change the font colors in preview columns while checking the import options? Show columns in blue font (as with value highlighting) if values would be imported as numbers, numeric dates, times, booleans, currencies, percent. Show green font if they would be interpreted as formulas. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Copy 2 lines of text 2. Paste-special into Calc 3. Choose "unformatted text" Actual Results: Mono-color preview in import dialog not indicating if the current settings are appropriate or not. Expected Results: Check "Detect special numbers" and dates in column preview are highlighted in blue. Uncheck "Detect special numbers" and dates in column preview are black again. Reproducible: Always User Profile Reset: No Additional Info: none
It could be helpful, specially in those more dubious cases. Let's see what UX/design says.
(Miguel Angel, make sure you add libreoffice-ux-advise@lists.freedesktop.org to CC too when their input is needed) These colours would need to be checked for accessibility, and probably be customisable in Options > LibreOffice > Application Colors. Maybe a toggle in the import to show them or not. Inherited from OOo as it already had the "Detect special numbers" option. OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 OOO330m20 (Build:9567)
Just a remark: the dialog's preview grid doesn't even know how data would be imported, it only displays the positions of fields of raw data according to field widths or separators and quotes.
It would be nice if the computer knows the difference between data, what a number is and what a date. But that's not true and everything imported from a CSV needs to be interpreted whether it is text or a number, if the number could be shown formatted as date/time. This processing is done after the data has been read, as Eike's points out in comment 3. So the request is unfortunately a WF.