Beyond Excel Feature: type coercion or "force cell data to a particular type"

Submitted by Bryce Nesbitt

Description

This is a feature request, something I don't get of of Excel, but hope one day Gnumeric can do.

Frequently I have messy spreadsheets to deal with. Often there will be some text that looks like a date, or a number, but is not.

The feature I'd like is a checkbox to "force" the data in a particular cell to be of a particular type. If the data can't be coerced(e.g. "2006-Julyyy-01"), then Gnumeric should complain or highlight the cell.

This will save time: because converting formats cell-by-cell is hard, especially when there are thousands of them. This will save errors: because you can get wrong results if the type of data is not what you expect (for example: text sometimes calculates as zero in a numeric expression).

Version: 1.7.x