Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 49978
Choosing "decimal point" character when importing .csv files
Last modified: 2014-09-18 06:04:05 UTC
Action: opening an international .csv file from a portuguese release. Since the floating numbers in the .csv file have "." as decimal point and the portuguese version is expecting ",", the data is interpreted as "ascii text" or as "dates" (when "-" is present) instead of fp numbers! One should be allowed to choose also the decimal point character when opening these files.
You can set this in the import diolog. Click onto the column head "Standard" in the part "Fields". Then the drop-down list "Column type" is enabled. There you can choose "US English" for your problem with the decimal delimiter.
OK. That turns around the problem, but is not obvious to use unless you document it! Besides, what if you export a file with "," as decimal point and an english user needs to open it? It would be nicer if you could add an additional field to choose the decimal point ("." - default, ",", other ___). Depending on how difficult it is to implement, may be you want to change priority to p5.
Good point with the comma in an english environment. Changed to enhancement and Prio 3, re-assigned to requirements.
*** Issue 59069 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Hello, should be well to retarget it to 3.0. I've evoked some simple discussion about this issue in our cs project's user mailing list. Really a lot of our users have many big problems with importing the CSV files with dots. Results are absolutely unambiguous: this is a frequent and important problem for them. -- Martin Kozák (CS User Support Leader)
I've got same problem. I have CSV files with dots as a decimal separator. Surely, I can use "US English" workaround, but what if I've got too many columns? And doing this every time? And what if I forget one column? I think, that numbers in any import/export medium should not formated by any country/language attributes. I suggest to use dot character as a default separator.
Added myself to cc. As I started over the last month to do again more advanced statistics, after basically an absence of more than 2 years, I got into the trouble of localisations. The problem is more weird, because setting "," as the decimal separator, basically invalidates the csv-file, while MS chooses to delimit the csv with ";" generating a lot of additional trouble because of this.