[R] [OT] (slightly) - OpenOffice Calc and text files

[Schwab,Wilhelm K]

Hello all,

I had a very strange looking problem that turned out to be due to unexpected (by me at least) format changes to one of my data files.  We have a small lab study in which each run is represented by a row in a tab-delimited file; each row identifies a repetition of the experiment and associates it with some subjective measurements and times from our notes that get used to index another file with lots of automatically collected data.  In short, nothing shocking.

In a moment of weakness, I opened the file using (I think it's version 3.2) of OpenOffice Calc to edit something that I had mangled when I first entered it, saved it (apparently the mistake), and reran my analysis code.  The results were goofy, and the problem was in my code that runs before R ever sees the data.  That code was confused by things that I would like to ensure don't happen again, and I suspect that some of you might have thoughts on it.

The problems specifically:

(1) OO seems to be a little stingy about producing tab-delimited text; there is stuff online about using the csv and editing the filter and folks (presumably like us) saying that it deserves to be a separate option.

(2) Dates that I had formatted as YYYY got chopped to YY (did we not learn anything last time?<g>) and times that I had formatted in 24 hours ended up AM/PM.

Have any of you found a nice (or at least predictable) way to use OO Calc to edit files like this?  If it insists on thinking for me, I wish it would think in 24 hour time and 4 digit years :)  I work on Linux, so Excel is off the table, but another spreadsheet or text editor would be a viable option, as would configuration changes to Calc.

Bill