How to remove a plain text protecting single quote from all the selected cells in LibreOffice Calc?
I've imported a CSV file having the first column to be date-time values in ISO 8601 format like
2012-01-01T00:00:00.000Z
for the first moment of the year 2012.
Then, willing to make LibreOffice to recognize the format (as I was looking forward to plot a diagram), I've selected the column, chosen Format Cells...
and entered the custom time format as
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.000Z
And this seems to work if... I edit a cell to remove a hidden single-quote from its beginning (which serves to protect a cell content from being interpreted) as all the newly formatted cells now store values like
'2012-01-01T00:00:00.000Z
(note the single quote - it is only visible when you edit a particular cell).
And I am to do so for all the cells in the column. How can I automate this?
UPDATE: I've already found a solution for the particular case of mine: it helps to set a column format to "time" in the CSV import dialogue. But I am still curious how could this be done in case I wouldn't have the original .csv data file to import but only the .ods file with the data already imported without the format specified at the import time.
Solution 1:
You can remove the leading single quote (which actually isn't part of the string in the cell) using a regex-based search and replace:
- Search for all characters between the start and end of the string
^.*$
- replace with match
&
Solution 2:
From the "Data" menu, choose "Text to columns".