Thread: Retaining cell borders when sorting

Hi sgreger1,

During sorting OpenOffice doesn't leave borders in the same place, but sorts them along with the rest of cell content.

I am using Excel 2003, so those of you using more recent versions of Excel may need to save using 'save as' and change the version to an earlier version that OpenOffice opens.

I made a second copy of my working file by clicking once on the file in ‘my documents’, then pressing CTR C (copy) followed by CTR V (paste). The reason for this 2nd copy, I wasn’t confident I would be happy with result so I created a backup.

Then you opened the ‘copy’ in OpenOffice, then sorted the content, then saved it in original format so Excel can open it later. I am not confident that all your formats will translate, so a backup is important. My objective with making a back up was, I can copy just the work sheet where the sort occurred back into the original documents so to carry out as few edits as possible in open office.

Disadvantages I noticed are:-
OpenOffice doesn’t support patterns in cells, during the opening process the patterns are converted to a darker shade of the original back ground colour in the cell. The converted colour is unlikely to be a default colour in OpenOffice and can’t be added as back ground colour to another cell if you wish to continue editing in OpenOffice.

OpenOffice is a free download. Hope this is useful to someone.

Regards Rodney