How to remove a plain text protecting single quote from all the selected cells in LibreOffice Calc

cellslibreoffice-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.

Best Answer

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 &
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