Introduction

Columns++ is a plugin for Notepad++ which offers features for working with text and data arranged in columns, including an implementation of elastic tabstops, enhanced searching and sorting, column alignment and numeric calulations. Like Notepad++, Columns++ is released under the GNU General Public License (either version 3 of the License, or, at your option, any later version). Columns++ was first released by Randall Joseph Fellmy in 2023; you can find the source code on GitHub.

Columns++ uses the C++ Mathematical Expression Toolkit Library (ExprTk) by Arash Partow, which is released under the MIT license; JSON for Modern C++ by Niels Lohmann, which is released under the MIT license; the Boost.Regex library, which is released under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0; and some files from the Unicode Character Database, which is released under the Unicode License V3.

Purpose and limitations

Columns++ is designed to provide some helpful functions for editing text or data that is lined up visually in columns, so that you can make a rectangular selection of the column(s) you want to process.

The integrated implementation of Elastic tabstops works to line up columns when tabs are used as logical separators, including tab-separated values data files as well as any ordinary text or code document containing sections in which you want to line up columns easily using tabs. You can use this feature on its own or with the other functions in Columns++.

Columns++ is optimized for use with Elastic tabstops. It also works with files that use traditional, fixed tabs for alignment, or no tabs at all; however, you should ordinarily select only one column at a time in files that don’t use Elastic tabstops.

Columns++ is generally not helpful when columns do not line up visually, such as in comma-separated values files. However, Columns++ can convert between delimiter-separated values and tabbed presentation; and there are some features, particularly Search using numeric formulas in regular expression replacement strings and Sorting with custom criteria, which may be useful in documents that are not column-oriented.

Elastic tabstops can cause loading and editing to be slow for large files. By default, Elastic tabstops is automatically turned off for files over 1000 KB or 5000 lines. You can change these limits.

Elastic tabstops

Columns++ includes a new implementation of Nick Gravgaard’s Elastic tabstops. (Please note that as of this writing I have not communicated with Mr. Gravgaard about my implementation of his proposal, and no endorsement on his part is implied. — RJF)

The first item of the Columns++ menu enables or disables Elastic tabstops. Elastic tabstops stretches tabs so that columns line up to fit their content, using only a single tab to separate one column from the next.

This implementation of Elastic tabstops includes some options that were not part of the original proposal. These options can be accessed by using the Profile... menu option. There are three “built-in” profiles:

You can select a profile from the drop-down box in the Elastic tabstops profile dialog. You can also change individual settings; choose some options to automatically enable a profile or disable elastic tabstops for different types of files; and save, rename or delete profiles.

Settings in an elastic tabstops profile

Along with the enabled or disabled status of elastic tabstops, the settings in an elastic tabstops profile are kept independently for each document you have open. These settings, which are available in the Elastic tabstops profile dialog, are:

These settings are only applied when you click the OK button near the bottom right of the dialog.

Saving, renaming and deleting profiles

You can save the settings in a profile by clicking the Save As... button to the right of the profile selection drop-down box. You can give the profile any name that does not begin with an asterisk or an open parenthesis and is not one of the three built-in profiles (“Classic,” “General” and “Tabular”). You can use the additional options from the drop-down menu at the right of the Save As... button to rename or delete a profile. If you have made changes to an existing profile that is not a built-in profile, you can save the changes without having to type the profile name again by using the Save option.

Automatically enabling or disabling elastic tabstops

By default, Columns++ uses whatever settings were in effect for the last active tab when you open a file or a new tab. You can change this behavior with the remaining options on the Elastic tabstops profile dialog.

The checkbox under the profile selection dropdown labeled Automatically enable this profile when opening type files. is available when a built-in or saved profile is selected (and Disable... when opening type files. in the bottom section of the dialog, which will be explained later, is not checked). Checking this box assigned the selected built-in or saved profile to be enabled whenever you open a file of the same type as the one you are currently viewing. The Type can be existing files with the same extension, existing files with no extension, or new files. This option is only applied when you click the OK button near the bottom right of the dialog.

The options in the box labeled When opening an existing file without an explicit rule for its extension allow you choose what happens when opening existing files for which you haven’t set either Automatically enable this profile... or Disable... when opening...:

The options in the box labeled Disable elastic tabstops (applies to all profiles) allow you choose specific conditions under which elastic tabstops should always be disabled:

Note that although the options for automatically enabling or disabling elastic tabstops do not affect the tab you have open, they are only applied when you click the OK button near the bottom right of the dialog.

Rectangular selections

Most of the commands from the Columns++ menu operate on rectangular selections.

You can select a single column or multiple columns separated by tabs. Since each tab is interpreted as a column separator, this works as expected when elastic tabstops are used. The results with traditional fixed tabs are not likely to be obvious or expected when sequences of multiple fixed tabs are included in the selection, since Columns++ interprets each tab as starting a new “logical” column without regard to physical placement.

When selecting one or more columns in a document using tabs, you should generally include the tab that ends the rightmost selected column in your selection. Unless all the entries in the last column are the same width, it is often difficult or impossible to get a complete selection without including the final tabs; in any case, Columns++ will process the trailing tabs intelligently.

When you invoke a command that requires a rectangular selection and the current selection is not a non-zero-width rectangular selection, Columns++ will inform you of this and, if possible, offer reasonable options to create a rectangular selection based on the current selection or cursor position.

You can enable specific “implicit” rectangular selections in the Options dialog if you would prefer that Columns++ make those selections without prompting you.

Selection submenu and keyboard shortcuts

The Selection submenu contains commands to create a rectangular selection based on the current selection.

The keyboard shortcuts are defined by default, but you can change or remove them using the Shortcut Mapper from the Settings menu in Notepad++. These commands do not always work sensibly when word-wrapped lines are included in the selection range.

Regular expressions

Several commands in Columns++ can use regular expressions for matching character strings. Columns++ uses the same regular expression engine, Boost.Regex, used in Notepad++, so the syntax and behavior are mostly the same. Some considerations unique to Columns++ are described below.

Within a rectangular selection, the selection in each row is matched independently of the surrounding text. The ^ assertion matches the beginning of the selection within a row, the $ assertion matches the end of the selection, and lookahead and lookbehind assertions cannot examine text past the boundaries of the selection. (Lookbehind assertions in Notepad++ can examine all text back to the beginning of the document, even when counting or replacing in a selection.) When using the Search in indicated region dialog, the region to be searched can be made up of one or more separate segments, each of which is searched independently. When a rectangular selection initializes the search region, each row of the selection becomes a separate segment of the search region.

A rectangular selection enclosing a series of lines, or the entire document, is not the same as an ordinary selection encompassing the same series of lines, or the entire document. Rectangular selections do not include line endings, and each line is a separate selection when matching. This applies to search regions created from such selections for use in the Search in indicated region dialog, where it can be important to distinguish these two cases (which, unfortunately, appear the same visually).

Matches for regular expressions using the \K directive are never replaced when performing stepwise Find and Replace in Notepad++. In the Search in indicated region dialog in Columns++, such matches can be replaced if you do not click outside the dialog between finding the match and replacing it.

Unicode

There are some significant differences in the way Columns++ and Notepad++ match regular expressions in Unicode documents. Columns++ treats the document text as a series of Unicode code points (i.e., UTF-32) while Notepad++ treats it as UTF-16. Most of the differences are related to this change.

There are no surrogate pairs in Columns++ regular expressions; each code point matches as a single character. To enter any Unicode character in hexadecimal notation, use the full code point; for example, enter 🙂 as \x{1f642}. (The surrogate pair, \x{d83d}\x{de42}, which must be used in Notepad++ search, will not match in Columns++.)

Scintilla, the display control used in Notepad++, represents Unicode internally as UTF-8. (This is true whether the file containing the document is UTF-8, UTF-16 or anything else other than “ANSI.”) When displaying Unicode documents that contain invalid UTF-8, Scintilla shows each byte that cannot be decoded as a hexadecimal code in reversed colors. You can match any of these bytes with \i; to match a specific byte, use the hexadecimal code Scintilla displays as a symbolic character name, e.g., [[.xF7.]]. (When matching a regular expression, Columns++ treats each of these error bytes as if it were the Unicode code point formed by adding 0xdc00 to the invalid byte. These code points are in the surrogate range and are invalid as UTF-32 code units.)

The period (.) matches any one code point except the characters which end lines in Scintilla: carriage return (\x0d or \r) and newline (also called line feed, \x0a or \n). This corresponds to the documented behavior of the period, but not the actual behavior in Notepad++ (where there are several other control characters it does not match). Use \X to match a character including any combining code points (marks) which follow it. (In Notepad++ search, . and \X do not work as expected when the code points involved are outside the basic multilingual plane, that is, 0x10000 or greater.)

The Unicode character classes and these escape sequences, negations (which match characters not in the class) and character classes are added:

Some symbolic names for collating elements have been added, including all the abbreviations used to display invisible characters; all can be entered in any mix of upper and lower case. This is the full list:

Search

Columns++ offers the ability to find and replace within a region marked by an indicator. Notepad++ uses several indicators, including the 1st to 5th Styles from the Search menu and the Find Mark Style used by the Mark function. Columns++ lets you use any one of those six indicators, or a custom indicator (the default), to define the region for searching.

By default, if there is a rectangular selection or a multiple selection when you begin a search, Columns++ will use it to set the search region. If a search region is not already set:

• if nothing is selected, the search region will be set to the entire document;
• if an ordinary selection covering more than a single line is present, the search region will be set to that selection;
• if a selection on a single line is present, Columns++ will show a dialog offering to create a rectangular selection based on the current selection, from which it will then set the search region.

The Search... item on the Columns++ menu opens the Search in indicated region dialog. Many of the options on this dialog are similar to the corresponding Notepad++ search options. You can drag the left or right edge of this dialog to make it wider, and you can leave it open while you edit the document in other ways.

Find what

The Find what box specifies the text, extended text or regular expression for which to search. Contiguous segments of the indicated region are searched sequentially (forward or backward), one at a time. It is not possible for a single match to span multiple segments. (E.g., for a region derived from a rectangular selection, each match must be contained in a single row.) When no more occurrences of the search string can be found, Columns++ gives a status message to that effect; if focus remains on the search dialog, the next search will resume from the beginning of the region.

When using regular expressions, the circumflex (^) and the dollar sign ($) match the beginning and end (respectively) of contiguous segments of the search region as well as their usual match to the beginning and ending of a line. This is particularly useful when the search region comes from a column selection, since ^ and $ will match the left and right ends of the selection in each row.

Replace with

The Replace with box specifies the text, extended text or regular expression replacement for search and replace operations.

When using regular expressions, the replacement can contain formulas, specified as:
(?=formula) or (?=format:formula)
within the replacement string; the Formulas section describes them in detail.

Technical note: The results of formulas are enclosed in parentheses and substituted into the regular expression replacement string before it is processed by the regular expression engine. Ordinarily this results in expected behavior and needs no consideration by the user. However, formulas in Columns++ support the return call described in section 20 of the ExprTk documentation. Using this call, it is possible to substitute an arbitrary character string; since the substitution occurs before regular expression replacement processing, characters substituted in this way will be interpreted as part of regular expression replacement. For example, (?=return ['$', reg(1)]) would be replaced by the capture group the number of which is given by the first capture group.

Extended search syntax

The syntax for extended find and replace strings is almost the same as in Notepad++ searches, with these exceptions:

• \U (note the capital U) can be followed by one to six hexadecimal digits to specify any valid Unicode character.
• \b, \d, \o and \x specify Unicode code points in Unicode files and bytes in non-Unicode files. In Notepad++ search they always specify Unicode code points.
• \b, \d, \o, \u and \x can be followed by any number of digits of the appropriate type up to the maximum for each (2 binary, 3 decimal, 3 octal, 4 hexadecimal and 2 hexadecimal, respectively); the first non-digit, or the maximum number of digits, terminates the sequence. In Notepad++ search these sequences must contain exactly the required number of digits.

Search actions

The Find, Count, Replace and Replace All buttons work like those in Notepad++ search, except that they search in the indicated region, and there is no Wrap around option. Instead, Find and Replace show a message at the bottom of the dialog when the end of the search region is reached and subsequently restart from the beginning of the search region, while Count and Replace All always make use of the entire search region. The downward-pointing arrowheads on the right side of the Count and Replace All buttons open menus of additional options.

From the Count button menu:

• Select All creates a multiple selection including one selection for each match in the search region.
• Count Before counts matches in the search region preceding the selection or caret. Matches which overlap the selection or caret are not counted.
• Count After counts matches in the search region following the selection or caret. Matches which overlap the selection or caret are not counted.
• Select Before creates a multiple selection including one selection for each match in the search region preceding the selection or caret. Matches which overlap the selection or caret are not selected.
• Select After creates a multiple selection including one selection for each match in the search region following the selection or caret. Matches which overlap the selection or caret are not selected.

From the Replace All button menu:

• Replace Before replaces matches in the search region preceding the selection or caret. Matches which overlap the selection or caret are not counted.
• Replace After replaces matches in the search region following the selection or caret. Matches which overlap the selection or caret are not counted.
• Clear History is shown when the Replace button has been used to make replacements using formula substitutions. Ordinarily the Replace functions will continue incrementing counters and referencing capture group and calculation history until after a Replace All/Before/After action is performed or the Replace with string is changed. This menu item clears the counters and the capture group and calculation history immediately.

Other controls in the Search dialog

When you initiate a search action, the region used for the search is determined by whether a region is already defined using the selected indicator, what is currently selected, and the Auto set check box in the Selection -> Region group box:

Backward direction, Match whole word only, Match case and the Search Mode options (Normal, Extended and Regular expression) have the same meanings as in the Notepad++ search dialogs.

Calculation

Columns++ can add or average columns of numbers or perform calculations across rows; these are explained below. See Number formats for details about how Columns++ recognizes numbers, how numbers are represented internally in calculations, and some limitations on the accuracy of calculations.

Calculating in columns

The Add numbers... and Average numbers... items on the Columns++ menu perform calculations on a rectangular selection of a column of numbers, or of multiple columns separated by elastic tabstops. (These commands can be used on selections that include traditional fixed tabs; but the results may not be as expected, since they treat tabs as logical separators, ignoring physical positioning.)

Columns++ shows a dialog to present the results of the calculation, which offers the following options:

Calculating across rows

The Calculate... command from the Columns++ menu inserts the results of a calculation into each line of a rectangular selection. The command opens a dialog which lets you supply the formula for the calculation. Formulas are described in a separate section; they are mostly ordinary mathematical expressions, with special variables and functions to represent numbers found in the selection; for example, if a single column of numbers is selected, this + 20 would add a column with each of the original numbers increased by 20. Here are the options on the Calculate dialog:

Formulas

Formulas are representations of mathematical computations. Columns++ uses the ExprTk (Expression Toolkit) package to implement formulas used by the Calculate... command and formulas in regular expression replacements for the Search functions. Following are descriptions of the variables and functions defined by Columns++, along with some general features of the syntax of ExprTk expressions. See Number formats for details about how Columns++ recognizes numbers, how numbers are represented internally in calculations, and some limitations on the accuracy of calculations.

Wherever a numeric value is used, it is also possible for the value to be Not-a-Number, an indication that something which was expected to produce a number failed to do so. This can happen because you tried to get a number from the document, but the associated text could not be unambiguously interpreted as a number. It can also be the result of an undefined mathematical operation, such as dividing by zero. In most cases, if any of the inputs to an operation or function are Not-a-Number, the result is also Not-a-Number. When the result of a formula is Not-a-Number, Columns++ does not insert any text (aside from a tab and/or spaces needed to keep columns aligned).

Variables and functions implemented by Columns++

When Calculate is applied to a rectangular selection, the formula given is evaluated once for each row of the selection (or, if a regular expression is given and Skip unmatched lines is checked, for each row in which the regular expression matches). The term row refers to the part of a single line in the document which is included in the rectangular selection, and the term current row is the row for which the formula is being evaluated, and into which the results of the formula will be inserted. Rows are processed in sequence, from top to bottom.

When formulas are used in regular expression replacements for the Search dialog, the formula given is evaluated once for each match. Formulas in regular expression replacements are specified as:
(?=formula) or (?=format:formula)

Syntax of formulas

Formulas are written using most of the common conventions for writing mathematical expressions in typical programming languages: numbers are written with an optional minus sign, digits and an optional decimal point (no commas); +, -, *, /, % and ^ indicate addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, remainder and exponentiation; parentheses are used to indicate order of operations. You can also use logical expressions built from common operators, including = or ==, != or <>, <, <=, >, >=, & and |, in a conditional expression:

so col(1)>10?col(2):col(3) gives the content of column 2 if column 1 is greater than 10, otherwise the content of column 3.

Formulas can use the many functions built into ExprTk, including these common mathematical functions:

and trigonometric functions (in all cases, angles are expressed in radians):

ExprTk expressions have many more features which are described in Sections 8, 12, 13 and 20 of the documentation for ExprTk. Columns++ supports the return call (section 20 of the ExprTk documentation). The returned strings and scalar values will be concatenated and inserted in the new column; if two or more scalar values are specified without intervening strings they will be separated by a tab character (if Tabbed is checked) or a single space. The concatenated string will be left aligned, regardless of whether Numeric aligned is checked.

Alignment

Align left, Align right, Align numeric and Align... process rectangular selections. The selection can be a single column, or multiple columns separated by elastic tabs. (These commands can be used on selections that include traditional fixed tabs; but the results may not be as expected, since they treat tabs as logical separators, ignoring physical positioning.) Alignment is accomplished by adding and/or removing ASCII spaces at the beginning and/or end of a column; therefore, precise alignment is not always possible when using proportionally-spaced fonts.

Align numeric

Details about how numbers are recognized and interpreted are given in the section on Number formats. The alignment of items which are not recognized as numbers is unchanged. The Decimal separator is comma item near the bottom of the Columns++ menu determines whether the comma or the period is the decimal separator.

The settings in the Time formats dialog determine how numeric alignment proceeds when there are numbers with colons. The Numbers with one or two colons represent setting identifies which colon (days:hours, hours:minutes or minutes:seconds) is present in all numbers with colons; that colon is aligned across all lines. Numbers without colons are aligned according to the Time units: numbers with no colons represent setting, such that they line up with the position that same unit would occupy in a time-formatted number with four segments, all of which except days have two integer digits (e.g., “1:00:00:00”).

Custom alignment

The Align... command opens a dialog which allows you to specify a string of one or more characters, or a regular expression, to be aligned in the column or columns within a rectangular selection:

Timestamps

The Timestamps... command opens a dialog that lets you convert between common timestamp formats. The command requires a rectangular selection, which can be a single column or multiple columns separated by tabs. The dialog is comprised of five sections: From counter, From date and time, Time zones and locale, To counter and To date and time.

The Overwrite selection checkbox at the bottom left of the dialog controls whether the results of the conversion replace the selected timestamps (checked) or whether one or more new columns are added to the right of the selection to hold the results (default, unchecked).

Note: The Timestamps... command does not work properly on older versions of Windows. Columns++ attempts to detect this and removes the menu item on those systems. Based on Microsoft documentation, the author expects that it will be fully functional on Windows 10 version 1903/19H1 and later, and on Windows Server 2022 and later; it may work on some older systems with the exception of time zone functionality.

From counter

From counter processing may be enabled or disabled using the check box at the top left of the section. When enabled, this section controls the interpretation of any items in the selection which consist of a single number. The number is treated as a counter representing elapsed time. The starting point is called the epoch and the length of time represented by an increase of one in the counter is called the unit.

Note: As with other Columns++ commands, numbers to be recognized as counters can include spaces, apostrophes and either commas or periods (whichever is not selected as the decimal separator). If your data contains date and time formats that are separated only by these characters (for example, 12.10.1980 if Decimal separator is comma is selected), be sure to disable the From counter section. You can leave it enabled if all your date and time formatted data uses separators that would disqualify the entries as numbers.

From date and time

From date and time processing may be enabled or disabled using the check box at the top left of the section. When enabled, this section controls the interpretation of any items in the selection which were not processed by the From counter section.

Time zones and locale

Time zones and locale specification may be enabled or disabled using the check box at the top left of the section. When enabled, this section lets you specify the time zones and the locale to be used. When this section is disabled (the default condition), Universal Coordinated Time is assumed and the locale of your Windows system is used. Only enable this section when you need to use specified time zones instead of Universal Coordinated Time, or to interpret or format dates and times in another language.

The top row in this section lets you choose the region and time zone assumed when parsing dates and times which do not include a time offset, and the region and time zone used to format generated dates and times. The bottom row lets you choose the language and locale used. Neither time zones nor locales apply to counters.

To counter

The To Counter button closes the dialog and converts timestamps to the specified counter. The other settings in this section have the same meaning as in the corresponding settings in the From counter section.

To date and time

The To Date/Time button closes the dialog and converts timestamps to the specified date and time format. An example of a date and time formatted as specified is shown just above the button.

Sorting

Notepad++ supports sorting lines using a rectangular selection to define the sort keys, but this does not work as expected when tabs (whether elastic or traditional fixed) are used. The sort commands in Columns++ use a rectangular selection to identify the sort keys and work as expected when tabs are present. These are “stable” sorts, meaning the order of lines with equal sort keys is unchanged. There are three variants of ascending and descending sorts:

Custom sorts

In addition to the six immediate sort commands on the Columns++ menu, you can use the Sort... command to open a dialog giving you more control over the details of the sort:

Conversion

Convert tabs to spaces

Use Convert tabs to spaces on any selection to replace tabs in the selection with equivalent spaces, taking elastic tabstops into account if enabled. If nothing is selected, the entire file is converted.

Convert separated values to tabs...
Convert tabs to separated values...

These commands convert the selection, or the entire file if nothing is selected, between delimiter-separated values (typically *.csv, comma-separated values) and tabbed presentation (typically *.tsv or tab-separated values).

Both delimiter-separated values and tab-separated values use a structure comprised of records (rows) containing fields (which are interpreted as being arranged in columns). In tabbed documents, each line of the file is a record, and fields within a record are separated by tabs. Fields cannot contain tabs or line-ending characters as such, but these can be encoded, typically using backslash notation (\t, \n, \r for tab, new line and return). Consistency requires that the encoding character must also be encoded (e.g., two backslashes in the file to represent a single backslash in the field’s value).

In delimiter-separated files, records are divided by line breaks and fields are divided by a separator character, typically a comma. However, when a field contains the separator character or line-ending characters, the problematic characters are escaped rather than encoded, meaning that the original character is still used in the file, but context indicates that it is not to be interpreted as a field or record separator. Typically, quote marks surround a field which contains line-ending or separator characters, and quotes within the field are doubled.

There are many variations in the details of data representation in delimiter-separated and tab-separated values files. When you select Convert separated values to tabs... or Convert tabs to separated values..., Columns++ displays a dialog in which you can adjust the conversion accordingly:

Number formats

Columns++ interprets characters in a document as numbers in many contexts, including the Calculation commands, the Align numeric command, numeric sort fields and formula substitutions in regular expression searches.

Numbers can include thousands separators and decimals. The Decimal separator is comma item near the bottom of the Columns++ menu determines whether the comma or the period is the decimal separator; thousands separators may be a space, an apostrophe, or whichever of comma or period is not the decimal separator. Numbers can also be times, using colons to separate days, hours, minutes and seconds.

Internal representation of numeric values and accuracy of calculations

When Columns++ performs calculations, it represents numeric values internally as double precision floating point numbers. Any number up to 9,007,199,254,740,992 without a fraction or decimal, positive or negative, is represented exactly. Most fractions and decimals cannot be represented exactly, but in ordinary use, rounding to a reasonable number of decimal places (so that the total number of digits before and after the decimal is under 15) will make discrepancies irrelevant. Numeric results which exceed 9,007,199,254,740,992 in absolute value are represented in scientific notation.

Recognizing numbers in documents

There is some flexibility in what can be included along with a number in a column or a regular expression match. Common currency signs can precede the number with or without a space, and a minus sign can precede or follow a currency sign. Non-numeric characters (such as units, like “mg” or “ft”) can follow the number. (These are not interpreted, though; Columns++ will add 5 yards and 5 inches to get 10 without complaint.) Non-numeric characters can precede the number if they are separated from the number by at least one space.

• Add numbers and Average numbers skip items that have no digits; but if an item which includes one or more digits cannot be unambiguously interpreted as a number, Columns++ will select the item and will not perform the calculation.
• In formulas, variables and functions which represent numbers in the document are set to Not-a-Number if the associated document text cannot be unambiguously interpreted as a number.
• When sorting numerically, fields which cannot be unambiguously interpreted as numbers sort to the beginning.
• Align numeric uses slightly more lenient rules for recognizing numbers; the alignment of items which are not recognized as numbers is unchanged. The limitations in the Internal representation of numeric values and accuracy of calculations section above do not apply to Align numeric, as this command does not convert numbers to internal representation.

Decimal separator is comma

Decimal separator is comma may be checked or unchecked to control how Columns++ interprets numbers. This setting is maintained per document (while the document remains open), so it can be different in different tabs.

Time formats

Time formats... opens a dialog that allows you to control how Columns++ interprets and shows numbers represented as times.

Options

Options... opens a dialog that allows you to control some aspects of Columns++:

Help/About

Help/About... provides access to release/version identification, this help file, and changelog, license and source information. It also allows you to check GitHub for the newest release and the latest stable release of Columns++.