Importing tab delimited data into OpenOffice.org

[Alma J Wetzker]

Bill Campbell wrote:
> 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.

Can you go back to comma delimiters instead of tabs?  Quote, comma delimited 
data goes back as far as I can remember in computers and the import help in OO 
calls it good.

     -- Alma