A Couple Convenient Toolbar Tips for OpenOffice Calc Number Formatting

I tell people in class that the best thing to do is to use the tooltips to figure out what icons are for. Nonetheless, it took me a while to start using a couple nice, simple little icons on the calc formatting toolbar:

• Add Decimal Place
• Delete Decimal Place

Here's the toolbar for number formatting in cells.

The currency, date, and percentage formatting pop out at you relatively easily. The defaults for your language are used: for US English it's $X,XXX.XX, X,XXX.XX%, and MM/DD/YY.

I also like the Standard Number Format icon, which lets you remove the fancier numbering formatting and just say “this is a plain old number.”

Here's where the decimal place icons come in. Let's say you've got some numbers like this.

The number of decimal places for the first column, Items, is uneven, so you'd like to add decimal places to the two middle ones. Just select the cells, and click Add Decimal Place.

 

The cells now have two decimal places.

 

Or look at the percentage numbers—maybe you just want to have no decimal places at all for the percentage points. Select the cells and click Delete Decimal Place.

The decimal places are deleted.

If you change your mind, you can always add again, and the same numbers come back. The names should be more accurately Hide and Show since no deleting is done.

Also note that the totals stay the same, so no rounding is done.

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If you don't have all the icons pictured in the toolbars, do this. Click and hold down on the black downward-facing arrow at the right side of the Calc formatting toolbar. Choose Visible buttons. A list of items will appear. Anything without a checkmark isn't displayed on the toolbar, but can be. Select any item you want; if it's not showing it will be displayed, and if it is currently on the toolbar (with a checkmark) it will be hidden. You can change the icons back and forth; nothing is deleted or added, just hidden or displayed.

Comments

[Bill Harris]

It's nice to see toolbar buttons that actually seem to do what you want. See this suggestion _not_ to use certain buttons in Word, for example, from the MS Word MVP site: http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Numbering/WordsNumberingExplained.htm. I've experienced spaghetti numbering, and it's no fun.

As far as I can tell from reading and from experience, OO.o is safe in that regard: using toolbar buttons won't set you up for later document disaster. Is that true?

[Solveig]

I saw the word "brain-breaker" in the article and didn't read any farther. ;> But OOo is definitely not about hiding complexity so I would hazard a confident guess that Writer numbering isn't going to have the same problems down the line. You sometimes have to specify Restart Numbering when you combine lists into a master document but that's easily done--and of course, everything's easier with styles.