report question

[Jack]

On 2016.12.20 02:18, timothy wrote:
> On Mon, 2016-12-19 at 20:54 -0500, Jack wrote:
> > I'm starting to do some tax planning work, and I just discovered  
> that
> > in exported reports, even the amount columns are ouput in quotes.   
> This
> > makes is difficult to do calculations on them.  (I use various
> > spreadsheet functions to take different cuts of various accounts and
> > categories.)  I looked in my spreadsheet from last year, and  
> apparently
> > I found some way to convert, but I don't remember whether I simply  
> did
> > it manually (unlikely) or managed to play with the import process.   
> Is
> > there any easy way to avoid the quotes around values that really  
> should
> > be numbers, and so not forced to text?  (this is in the export files
> > for reports)
> 
> I export my reports (with quotes) to a csv file and then open directly
> in Libre Office Calc with "Text delimiter" option set as " and  
> separator
> as Comma. You can then change the text to numbers with the Format  
> option
> in Calc if necessary.
Hi Timothy,

Thanks for the suggestion, but it doesn't really work.  With the  
quotes, the number fields import as text, with a leading single quote,  
which you can't find or replace (other than manually, one cell at a  
time.)  What I did discover is that I can format that column as  
currency (with no apparent change) and then select the column and do a  
find replace of a single space to nothing.  That fixes all the values,  
except those with enough digits that they didn't have a leading space.   
The real issue is that values that really are numbers (currency) should  
not have quotes around them in the csv.  If all you want to do is save  
and print, that works OK, but not if you want to do anything further,  
such as using any financial calculations, unless you manually assure  
each such cell is recognized as numeric by libreoffice.

Jack