[X-Apps] AppleWorks 6.2.4 spreadsheet

[Doug McNutt]

At 19:25 -0500 12/6/03, Albert D'Amanda wrote:
>Using Apple Works 6 Spreadsheet , how do you so this ?

Oh.  I went over to my OS neXt box and tried AppleWorks 6.2.4. I plead guilty to using that other spreadsheet here on my 8500 running 9.1. My OS neXt box shall remain Microbesoft free.

There seems to be no way to force the format to TEXT. I'd say that's a serious oversight for someone trying to compete. Apple?  Are you listening?

Option 1 was to place a letter at the start of the number as a workaround. Many letters work. These do not:

. (period), +,  -,   (space), =

I do have some suggestions for first characters:

' (a single quote mark) That's what Excel uses and if Apple gets its act together that's what they'll probably use.

OPTION space, a non-breaking space, does the trick and doesn't show in the cell as displayed.

Surrounding the number with double quotes just shows the quote marks

="1234567890123456789" displays properly. The = sign introduces a formula which says the stuff in quotes is text. What I'm not sure is how that would affect sorting and possibly speed of execution in anything complicated.

If you select the cell with the ="x" formula in it and then copy to put it on the clipboard you can "paste-special" with values only. into another cell. The result seems to be the text only. It'll be fun to experiment with adding a number to it! (It converts back to scientific notation.)

=CONCAT("1234567890123456789","") is an interesting option. It's a bit like the cat command in Linux.

It might be possible to prepare an AppleScript which would add in the = sign and double quotes so a number could be taken from the clipboard and stuffed into a selected cell. Microsoft VBA macros are a pain but AppleScript is even harder to figure out.


-- 
The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck
     is the day they start selling vacuum cleaners