All cells after column IW are locked

Discuss the spreadsheet application
Post Reply
madbrain
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Apr 02, 2012 11:02 pm

All cells after column IW are locked

Post by madbrain »

Hello

When loading XLS files, on sheets with data protection, all cells after column IW are locked. This makes it impossible to add extra rows (because some very far columns with no data in them are protected), preventing the user from doing any modification to the order of rows or adding extra rows, etc. We know .xls doesn't support data in columns after IW, but this issue does not affect us (we only use about 30 columns).

- We can't switch to *.ods format because the data is meant to be used along with a converter written in python. (using an xls import library)

- Data protection is used to preserve the data on row 2, since that's what our converter uses to know the use of each column (if the user renames them, that will screw the conversion).

Is there any way of changing this behaviour?
OpenOffice 3.3.0 on Windows 7
( OOO330m20 )
User avatar
Villeroy
Volunteer
Posts: 31346
Joined: Mon Oct 08, 2007 1:35 am
Location: Germany

Re: All cells after column IW are locked

Post by Villeroy »

The xls file format supports 65536 rows and no more than 256 columns.
Please, edit this topic's initial post and add "[Solved]" to the subject line if your problem has been solved.
Ubuntu 18.04 with LibreOffice 6.0, latest OpenOffice and LibreOffice
madbrain
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Apr 02, 2012 11:02 pm

Re: All cells after column IW are locked

Post by madbrain »

Right. The issue is that when loading XLS with locked sheets, the data in unsupported columns (over 256) is locked, instead of just being blank.

Result: you cannot add any rows - that would force you to move the locked data downwards, which is not allowed.

If you load the data in MS Excel, you can still add rows, because the columns over 256 simply don't exist, instead of being filled with dummy locked cells.
OpenOffice 3.3.0 on Windows 7
( OOO330m20 )
Post Reply