Fixing numbers (that appear as text) in LibreOffice

Time to start cracking Unitarian Universalist Association numbers again. Congregational certification ends at the end of the month, and it’ll be exciting to see this year’s membership and financial numbers.

These days, one can download the certification numbers in a CSV file, which I then open in a LibreOffice spreadsheet. (And thanks to whomever made that improvement.) But anything with a dollar sign is essentially a text item, not a number to be manipulated.

If you find and replace all of the dollar signs, you will find that they were replaced by a single opening quotation mark.

See this page for instructions on how to successfully remove it. (This post is as much a reminder for myself as instruction for others.)

Happy data crunching!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.