OpenOffice.org

If you're importing Open Office / Libre Office Calc files or Excel spreadsheets into MySQL using PHPMyAdmin, you might have run into the occasional case where the process hangs with either a partially imported set or no records at all. After some messing around, I have found that this usually happens when there's a problem with the input data. In my case, this usually stemmed from duplicate primary keys or similar issues. Unique keys were detected fine.

In other words, PEBKAC.

If you have ever pasted data into Calc in Open Office, you'll notice that any hyperlinks in the input data will be retained as hyperlinks rather than reduced to plain text. While this might be beneficial behaviour to some, it wasn't for me this afternoon. After a little digging around, I found that an easy way of removing the hyperlinks is by highlighting all the affected cells, right-clicking and choosing the Default Formatting option.

The associated CTRL + M shortcut (as seen in the Format menu) did not work for me.

While importing some data today, I found myself having to convert the Roman numerals in the source to decimal. While there are scripts and tools available on the Internet to do so, a quicker way exists (or, at least, it did for my case). This solution is to simply import the data into Open Office Calc and use one of its native functions to do the conversion.

Off late, I have had to use OpenOffice.org's Calc quite regularly. While it generally works quite well, it has a lot of wonky little bugs that can be quite frustrating. One of these has to do with the autofilter.

When using the autofilter, you will, on occasion find that once you are done using it and try to remove it, a number of rows, usually empty, will be missing post-removal. The following are steps/tools that might help you recover these rows: