Re: Text import & a bug

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Sat, Sep 20, 2003 at 11:26:10AM +0100, Nick Lamb wrote:
> Thoughts on text import, but first an actual bona fide bug which no doubt
> will make Jody go "doh" and he'll have a one line fix :)
>
> A1 is text "Foo bar baz"
> A2 is blank
> A3 is text "Qux quux quuux"
>
> Select A1:A3
> Data -> Text to columns...
>
> Click forward through all the default settings...
>
> "Error: Invalid Unable to paste : 'destination does not have an even
> multiple of source rows (3 vs 2)

somewhat fixed.  We now accept blanks and hidden content.  I suspect
it would be nice to have a 'filter blanks' option on the text
importer, and it would be easy to add.  The handling of hidden data
is tricker.  We really should ignore it.  However, the underlying
support mechanism uses the clipboard to paste the result, and that
does not support pasting only to visible cells.

> The smart default text handling does a very good job on CSV data of the
> sort created by a Perl script somewhere, or exported from some other
> database or spreadsheet program. This represents the most important type
> of text import because it's rarely a "one off" so we need to make it
> completely painless.
>
> However if an oh-so-clever web site calls these files .XLS in order to
> trigger Windows into using the "right" software to examine them then
> Gnumeric acts dumb. Are there any _real_ files that don't match the
> excel_file_probe() but do actually contain XL format data?
>
> Example: http://www.tpc.org/information/results_spreadsheet.asp

Doh!
I disabled all of the plugin probe functions while fixing csv/tsv
probe a few months ago.  Fixed.