Bug, or no bug?

[acknak]

Is it acceptable that OOo, through a normal operation (although with an easily-made mistake), should be knocked out of commission for an hour?

Here's what I did:

1) In Calc, I have a document with data in nine columns (A-I) and ~150 rows.
2) I selected columns A-I by clicking on the column headers
3) Copy
4) Paste into a new Writer document as "Formatted Text (RTF)"

As soon as it took longer than 5s, I knew where my mistake was: I had selected the entire set of columns, and not just the cells with the data.

Just out of curiosity, I let it run (there's no way to stop it, other than killing the whole program). It took almost an hour to finish pasting the data: a table with 65000 empty rows. The text document was >1300 pages long!

I guess the real solution would be to have it not take an hour to finish, but somehow it doesn't seem good that normal operations should trigger such a bad experience.

What do you think? Is this a bug? What should OOo do differently--maybe copy only the cells with data?

[huw]

It should give a "You have a large amount of data on the clipboard" style warning, as some other software does, and give you the choice of cancel or continue. Good luck getting that into "requirements", rather than "enhancements, later".

[Bill]

What do you think? Is this a bug? What should OOo do differently--maybe copy only the cells with data?

I think only the cells with data should be copied. I'd call it a bug, but the developers might view it as an enhancement. If the columns are selected and copied from Calc and pasted in another sheet in Calc, the paste is almost instantaneous, but pasting into either Writer or Word 2000 seems to be pasting the entire column. I also tried copying columns from Excel 97 and pasting into Word 2000 and Writer to see what would happen. In both cases, only the region with cells containing data were copied.

[Hagar Delest]

+1 for the bug.

NB: took me 20 seconds to paste it (as Calc 8) and I've an old laptop with 256 MB of RAM. The result was a thin line that I had to enlarge to see something.

[acknak]

Always look for the bug report before posting.
Always look for the bug report before posting.
Always look for the bug report before posting.
Always ...

Added a comment to Issue 84411: Copy while whole column selected should trim trailing cells.

Thanks for the follow-up. It's good to know that truncating the selection is a viable alternative.

[JohnV]

We might look on the bright side of this. OOo actually did this huge paste without dying!