Importing tab delimited data into OpenOffice.org

[Bill Campbell]

I've been beating my head against what should be a simple problem using
openoffice.org spread sheets.  I want to import tab separated data into a
spreadsheet with very simple data.  There are four fields checkno, date,
description, and amount where the first field is alphanumeric, second a
date, third alphanumeric, and fourth a decimal.  This probably has to be
done with text data sources as the data is to be merged into a spreadsheet
without clobbering everything that's there.

My problem is getting OO-calc to get the correct data types.  I've tried
several permutation with and without quotes, the most recent being to put
double quotes around the text fields leaving the date and amount fields
unquoted.  I have set the text info in data sources admin. to use tab
delimiters with double quotes on text data.  Unfortunately this now imports
the date field as text, and the amount field as a date.  To make matters
worse, it sometimes works properly.

I can probably create DBASE compatible files where the types would be in
the headers, but I should think that tab delimited ascii would work.

Bill
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