Copy-down, -right trick

[Bob Mesibov <mesibov southcom com au>]

My wife and I are heavy users of spreadsheets for organising data, and our spreadsheet of choice is Gnumeric 
(currently 1.10.8, under Linux).  This morning my wife discovered by accident a copy-down and copy-right 
trick in Gnumeric. It's a very handy trick and we wondered whether it's a designed feature, or sort of a 
'helpful bug'?

The 2 standard ways to copy down the contents of a cell are (1) drag the lower right-hand corner of the cell 
to cover the cells to be copied into, and (2) select the cell and the empties to be copied into, then Crtl+D. 
If you only want to copy down 1 cell, the trick is to select the empty cell *only* and Crtl+D. To copy right 
into the next empty cell, select that one empty cell and Ctrl+R.

The same trick works for strings of cells. To copy down the contents of 4 adjacent cells in a row, select the 
4 empty cells beneath and Ctrl+D. This is a very useful maneuver when entering data row by row. Neither the 
mouse not the Shift key is needed.

The trick doesn't work in OpenOffice Calc, but it does in the one Excel version we have access to (Excel 
2003).