Google-sheets – Assert cell style onto text pasted into that cell

There is not normally any difference between sorting on values as such or sorting on the results of formulae. Column A shows the result of applying weekday to the chronologically entered values in ColumnB. D:E is a copy of A:B but sorted on Column D ascending.

There may be issues however with certain formulae that use the likes of Row() or offset, in which case it would help if your Q specified or gave an example of such formulae.

Manual paste

Indeed, pasting plain text with Ctrl-V results in it having the default size of 10. It seems that pasting is understood to overwrite the formatting of the cell, even if it's plain text coming in.

The solution is to paste using Ctrl-Shift-V, which means paste values only. Then the font size is 12 pt, as set in the spreadsheet, regardless of where the text came.

Script modification

Generally, when you simply use .setValue(value), the existing formatting of the cell remains. For example, if the cell A1 was formatted as "1 Jun 2015" then executing

sheet.getRange("A1").setValue(new Date());

will respect that formatting.

The format is changed only if the script explicitly applies a different formatting with Utilities.formatDate(). I would say this is to be expected, and the fact that the old version behaved differently is more of a bug or poor design.

It's known that the new sheets have a somewhat different format functionality.

Migration can be a breaking change for some scripts: for example, one of my scripts stopped working because it tried to store more than 50000 characters in a single cell (which was possible with the old version, but not with the new one).