Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

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I think in a lot of cases its not even the advanced stuff that keeps people on Excel and other proprietary things. It's the seemingly little things.

My biggest beef with LibreOffice's spreadsheet (and with Apple's Numbers) is how they handle copy/paste of discontiguous selections.

Consider this 5 row by 3 column set of data:

Suppose you select the 1 2 3 row, the 7 8 9 row, and the a b c row, copy them, and paste just below the d e f row. In Excel you get this (first 4 rows omitted for brevity):

In LibreOffice and Numbers you get this (empty cells denoted by "-"):

  d e f
  1 2 3
  - - -
  7 8 9
  a b c

I haven't found a setting to change this. Excel doesn't have a setting for this either as far as I know, so people who do want discontiguous copy/paste to preserve spacing would probably be as irked by Excel as I am by LibreOffice and Numbers. But I don't think I've ever actually wanted the spacing preserved so it is LibreOffice and Numbers that irk me.

I get the same result in LibreOffice 7.5.5 as your Excel example. Which LibreOffice version did you use?

7.5.5.2 on MacOS.

The only thing I can think of is macOS clipboard manager somehow interfering with the copied data. Was testing on Linux kf5 UI.

Also, I can preserve the empty row, if I paste with Ctrl+Shift+Alt+V (Edit - Paste Special - Paste Unformatted Text). This opens the Text Import dialog.

You've solved it!

I turned off the clipboard history app I use and now LibreOffice pastes like Excel.

The history app I use is 10 years old and I see that the company that made it apparently is no longer around (or at least their domain no longer works) so I guess I should get a newer clipboard history app.

Great to hear :)

Re: a new clipboard app, I often see people recommending CopyQ, which is cross-platform: https://github.com/hluk/CopyQ

To me Excel's behaviour is way more problematic here. I carefully select the data I want, and it silently includes irrelevant data as well. I don't want the spacing preserved, but I really don't want other random data included.

It doesn't include other random data. You select N rows, contiguous or discontiguous, and those are copied to N consecutive rows starting at the paste point.

It includes things that aren't selected, which is other random data. If I select, copy, and paste, the only desirable outcome is that I get a copy of my selection.

I don't understand what you mean. In my example I select the cells that contain 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, a, b, c, then copy, then go somewhere else and paste, and Excel pastes 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, a, b, c. I don't see an other data.

Try pasting into another app, like a text editor.

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