• http://openoffice.org

Find '.+' (or similar) and Replace with '&' effectively re-enters the contents of cells. This can be used to 'strip' formatting automatically applied by Calc (often needed to 'clean' data imported from the clipboard or badly formatted files), for example, to convert text strings consisting of digits, into actual numbers (the cells must first be correctly formatted 'number'). The leading apostrophes, telling Calc to treat the numbers as text, are removed.