[Issue] Repeat / fill of character (leading or trailing)

[ArcSine]

Greetings, all!

In Excel I make frequent use of the "repeat" format code, which is of the generic form " *x " where 'x' designates the character to be repeated in such a way as to fill the cell regardless of its width.

For example, I'll use this formatting to, say, enter the value 45 into a cell, along with " *. " in the format code, and the displayed (and printed) results will either be

....................45

or

45...................

depending on whether I set it up to be a leading or trailing set of dots. Very handy for enhancing the attractiveness of certain reports, etc.

After a significant bit of Googling, reviewing the Calc manual, and executing a search on this forum, I can't find whether or not LibreOffice Calc has a similar capability, and if so, how to invoke it.

Very many thanks in advance!

[acknak]

Sorry, that format code is not supported in Calc. There's no workaround that I know of.

I believe this is covered (for OOo at least) by: Issue 23839: Underlines in user defined number format, accounting underlining
You can register there and add your vote (up to two) or comment.

[ArcSine]

I do indeed appreciate it, acknak!

Given that (a) spreadsheets are frequently the weapon of choice for generating financial reports and schedules; (b) the leading / trailing dots technique is popular in such reports; and (c) Writer has the "fill character" capability for its tab stops, I wouldn't be surprised if this capability shows up in Calc sometime soon.

Still, I'll improve my odds a bit with a vote as you've suggested . Thanks again, and have an excellent weekend.

[hansemann]

A friend of mine (he works as a tax adviser/consultant) told me about the Microsoft Excel
"Extra formatting capabilites" regarding a fill-in character ...

I implemented on my linux box a proof of concept ... I think it should be no problem to insert this
into the corresponding file on a box with the Microsoft Windowing operating system and to rebuild
the OpenOffice soffice.exe binary for the Microsoft platform from the adapted source file stack.

--> please see my comment on the OpenOffice Bugzilla entry
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=23839#c15

Good Luck!

regards,
hans

Post Scriptum & Caveat Emptor: My "prototypical" implementation expects the dyad (i.e. the * followed
by the fill-in character) to be enclosed in double quotes (i.e. it is defined as a string entity which survives
the normal "number format processor" and gets evaluated (very late) in the output2.cxx::ScOutputData::DrawStrings() method .
in Order to read in a spread sheet cell:

Code: Select all

...................45

you would need to define a user defined NumberFormatString

Code: Select all

"*."#

(beware of the double quotes enclosing the

Code: Select all

*

followed by the fill-character

Code: Select all

.

)