Turn off number format autorecognition in OpenOffice

Wow, that’s a long title. And inversely proportional to title length, as always, is the number of people that will find this useful. But I did:

Word and OpenOffice/NeoOffice and probably other word processors have this nice feature that converts text into tables, based on the placement of tabs, periods, or user-selected characters. So I could easily turn:

1;2
3;4

Into the appropriate table by, in NeoOffice for example, selecting the text then choosing [Tools] : [Text <-> Table]. The problem is that OpenOffice is too smart. It automatically recognizes whether it’s looking at text or numbers — at least it tries to.

Unfortunately, I’m creating tables made using the Outreg module for Stata. This nice little ado file takes multiple regressions and turns them into fancy tab delimited text files that can be used to make journal style tables. But it reports standard errors in parentheses under coefficient estimates, like so:

6.7
(2.34)

But NeoOffice (and I assume, OpenOffice), thinks that the parenthesis represent negative numbers, like in accounting. So when I tableize my text, I get a bunch of negative numbers that should be in parenthesis.

Ah, but as always, there’s a fix: Go to [Tools] [Options] [Text Document] [Tables] and uncheck the box that says [Number format recognition] under the “Input in tables” heading. Problem solved.