Hi,

I have written my own matlab script to output a cell array to csv format, but I am having problems when I try to view the file in openoffice. In my script, if the length of the string in the cell is longer than 30 characters long I put a linefeed \n into the fprintf. This all works great and the linefeed works in Open Office, however the width of the columns are still set to the width of the entire length of the string. For example, in my cell I will have several lines 30 chars long, say four lines or 120 chars, and the width of the cell that it is contained in matches the width of about 120 chars long rather than 30. This is a problem because it shows the text all left aligned in the cell, which looks great, but there are pages of white space to the right and the next column is off the screen. This seems obviously inconvenient.

If the string is longer than 30 chars I output it in the following way:

" First 30 characters of the string
the rest of the string
and so on"

I feel like there should be a simple solution to this but I can't find it. Is this a problem with Open Office or my understanding of csv? Would excel have the same problem? How can I fix this?

Thanks,
Bob

Since the script is your own, you should consider removing the newline if the length is > 30.

Excel would have the same problem.

Alternatively, you can concatenate the trimmed contents of all the fields thus:

If the data is in column A1 (row 2 in this case), the formula

should do.

If needed, you can further modify the formula to check the length of the string in A1 using a series of nested immediate ifs.

Eg:If(len(a1>90);CONCATENATE(MID(A1;1;3);MID(A1;31;3);MID(A1;61;3);MID(A1;91;3));if(len(a1>6)..