Importing tab delimited data into OpenOffice.org

[Shawn Tayler]

On Sat, 05 Feb 2005 18:42:32 -0600 Alma J Wetzker <almaw at ieee.org>
exclaimed:

> 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.
> > 
> 
> 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.
> 

I've been going the other way and sed has helped alot with it:

cat datafile | sed 's/\t/\,/g' > newdatafile

Shawn