Open Office Calc is now broken, wth

Beerina

Sarcastic Conqueror of Notions
Beerina
Joined
Mar 3, 2004
Messages
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Downloaded Open Office so I could use the spreadsheet to graph some data. Open my space-delimited text data file in it, did some graphs.

So far so good.

It then crashed. Re-started it. Now I go to open the exact same .txt file from within Calc (within Calc, keep in mind) and it is happy to let me select it, but then it spawns the word processor for it instead of popping up the spreadsheet import dialog (which lets you select spaces, commas, tabs, etc. to import to the spreadsheet.)


Good god. Any ideas? Been working at it for half an hour now. Some years ago someone at Microsoft thought themselves so bright they'd get rid of "import" as an explicit option, and just do "open" instead, hee hee, wee so smaaaht! Open Office clones. Or maybe the other way around. Irrelevant.

Well, guess what? It breaks. It's a bad idea and bad model. I know what I want to do, and you guys don't.
 
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Ok, 10 minutes later and it magically got better. Or maybe not.

"Open" under Calc spawns the word processor.

Drag-and-drop from the desktop onto the blank spreadsheet pulls up the proper spreadsheet import wizard.


Still a stupid thing to disallow the import option from the file menu.
 
Beerina said:
Ok, 10 minutes later and it magically got better. Or maybe not.

"Open" under Calc spawns the word processor.

Drag-and-drop from the desktop onto the blank spreadsheet pulls up the proper spreadsheet import wizard.


Still a stupid thing to disallow the import option from the file menu.
Click to expand...
It's a good solid reliable free suite.

Redownload.

If still problems go to prior stable version.
 
If you go to Insert > Sheet from file, you get what used to be import and can create a page from a .txt document with the standard character delimiting.

Or you can rename your.txt to .csv which is a common kind of data file.

But overall I can't stand how open office handles charts and graphs and it's what drove me back to my Office XP disks from college after I tried it a few months ago. It just seems primitive compared to what MS had been doing nearly a decade ago.
 
Oh I like it a ton, I've used it before -- I had to download it again because my machine wiped due to virus six months ago and I had to reinstall everything.

This time I've split the HD into two partitions so next time I won't have to lose all my data, kept judiciously on the second drive.


Just having the "open" function divert into the generic open-associated-app feature instead of the local app's import feature probably isn't the wisest decision given the absence of a specific "import" function under that app's file menu.
 
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