Open Office Calc - Solution For Formulas Not Working

I've been trying to use Open Office Calc as a spreadsheet for some time now. Although it is very similar to MS Excel, there are a few bugs that really bug me. One problem I had recently was that a formula that was working was suddenly not working. I had the format correct, including using ; instead of , to separate items in an IF formula (Calc uses ; instead of , as in Excel). But it just wasn't working. I tried it in a new file and it worked fine. Through trial and error I eventually discovered that I had to reformat the whole column to accept 2 decimal places and then it worked. Then I had to go in and manually reformat individual cells where I did not want decimal places to show. What a hassle. Anyway, that is the way to get it to work if you have this problem.