[mdlug] Why is a blank cell != zero value in OpenOffice-Calc 3.5

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Thu, 2012-11-15 at 18:06 -0500, R KANNAN wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 5:59 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 5:56 PM, R KANNAN <rk111810 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 5:51 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >> On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 5:44 PM, R KANNAN <rk111810 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > these cells in non-contiguous columns and rows.
> > > This sheet was perfectly fine in OO2.2 :-(
> > > BTW I am using Libre Office 3.5 in Ubuntu 12.04 if it makes any
> > difference
> > If a cell is an empty string, it probably has ['] as its content.
> Nope. All the cells where I successfully managed to fix by 'delete
> contents' did not have anything.

No, they did have something - if delete contexts fixed the problem.  You
just couldn't *see* anything.  There was an invisible something.

In spreadsheets there is kind of an implicit "'" at the beginning of
every string value.  It may or may not be displayed based on the sensed
type of the cell.  Yes, this sucks,  but it is not specific to OOo/LO,
it goes all the way back to Lotus 1-2-3.