Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Solve an iWork/Excel data paste and charting glitch' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Solve an iWork/Excel data paste and charting glitch
Authored by: Han Solo on Mar 03, '05 10:28:05AM
I have not tried this, but why not simply format your dates as "text" within Excel? There are two ways to do this, one on data entry and one with a collection of cells.

As you enter data you'd like Excel to interpret as a string, precede the data with a left quote. That is, type '1997 in the cell for year "1997." You'll know that Excel is treating it as a string as the text "1997" will be left-justified instead of right-justified.

Alternatively, enter all your years as numbers (or strings when typing "2004e"), then highlight the cells and select "Cells..." from the Format menu in Excel. Choose "Text" and all your dates will be left-justified strings again.

As I mentioned I have not tested this solution, so it is possible that Keynote and/or Pages will be a bit too clever and automatically convert the text strings of numbers into integers (i.e. data) -- but if not the above should work fine. HTH.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Solve an iWork/Excel data paste and charting glitch
Authored by: robg on Mar 03, '05 11:03:21AM

I actually tried that first -- both formatting as text, and using the single quote.

The problem is that the clipboard itself doesn't retain any of that info. To the clipboard, data is data, whether it's a text or a number. So when Keynote/Pages gets the clipboard contents, it doesn't get it with any intelligence. They see a number in the first column, and they decide to add those numbers to the data portion of the chart.

So the only workaround is to make sure that the first value on the clipboard is truly text, and cannot be intrepreted as a value...

-rob.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Solve an iWork/Excel data paste and charting glitch
Authored by: osxpounder on Mar 07, '05 05:28:49PM

I never really paid attention to Keynote or Pages until I saw that nice chart image you posted, Rob. Now I've gotten iWork; Apple should thank you! I do.

---
--
osxpounder



[ Reply to This | # ]