Re: Copying all

[Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com>]

On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 09:40:27AM -0600, Thomas R . Shannon wrote:
> When I work with spreadsheets, I frequently like to copy all of the 
> vaues in the sheet and paste them elsewhere (usually pasting the values 
> special).  I noticed that when selecting and copying the whole sheet via 
> the button at the origin of the rows and columns, the program slows 
> considerably.  I assume that this is because the program indeed copies 
> everything, empty cells and all.  Wouldn't it be more efficient to have 
> the program define the limits of the data within the sheet and only copy 
> those cells?  Or would this be difficult to implement?  I wonder how 
> excel and lotus do it?  They don't appear to slow nearly as much when 
> this method is used.

Gnumeric only copies the cells with data.  Trust me copying an
entire 256x64k matrix of cells would be much slower.  There is still
plenty of room for improvement.  However, that is not high on the
priority scale right now.

Correctness, and completeness.  We have lots of ideas for
optimization, but try to avoid acting on them until later.

If you're in the mood to help with completeness it will decrease the
time before optimization :-)