Saving spreadsheets in a text-editable format
It’s bugged me for a while that while it’s a joy to replace blob-making rich text documents with a format like Markdown (or RST or AsciiDoc), which can be edited with Vim or any text or code editor and, crucially, committed to version control with human-readable diffs, there didn’t seem to be any way to do that with
one of the top search results is from 2003, though there’s at least one CSV file handler for Vim that’s regularly updated. The screenshot alone of that one scares me.
http://alangrow.com/blog/turn-vim-into-excel-tips-for-tabular-data-editing
https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im
And apparently RStudio is an option.
Keywords:
- vim spreadsheet
- libreoffice calc symbol for current row in formula
- one symbol replacement of INDEX() in spreadsheet
So, first of all, with LibreOffice, it’s hidden as anything and the documentation contradicts what i’m about to say, but it does work:
- Go to File
- Go to Save As or Save a Copy
- Checkmark “Edit filter settings” in the lower left of the initial dialog before pressing Save in the upper right.
- Only now press Save.
- Checkmark, in the now-resulting-extra-powered-dialog, “Save cell formulas instead of calculated values”.
- Press save.
Wola, you’re done, and you have a mostly full-powered spreadsheet that isn’t an utter sin to commit to version control.