Re: Copy-down, -right trick

[Andreas Guelzow <aguelzow pyrshep ca>]

On Sat, 2011-01-08 at 18:26 +1100, Bob Mesibov wrote:
> 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'?

designed feature

Andreas

> 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).