GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 530956
Gnumeric should warn about pasting into too many cells
Last modified: 2010-06-16 18:57:50 UTC
Hi. Gnumeric should warn when a pasting operation will take up too much memory, and/or present a progress bar that can be canceled. To replicate Copy a cell Select an entire sheet Paste Watch Gnumeric take up all your memory, all your swap, and crash your computer. Only option - kill Gnumeric, losing all unsaved work. For a more in depth discussion, see http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=59453
Well, we should use less memory and make it a non-issue.
Morten: this is likely never becoming a non-issue, as we allow users to create an arbitrary number of rows and columns. I do hate programs that ask me all the time whether I really want to do what I just told it to do. So I would hate Gnumeric asking me whether I really want to copy this single cell into every cell of my huge spreadsheet (unless the program is reasonably sure that there isn't going to be enough memory available).
Andreas: I an understand why you hate it. I would also hate it for every operation (but currently, the entire sheet does take up more than available memory by far). On the other hand, I really hate pressing a mistaken key combination, and have all my memory and my swap be consumed by Gnumeric. How about splitting the difference, and making big/slow copy operations pop up a "copying now" window (maybe like FireFox search bar which is in the same window) with a CANCEL button, so you can cancel if it is taking too much time and/or memory?
We could change the meaning of Ctrl-A to select the smallest rectangle that starts at A1 and includes all contents. I am not quite sure what the purpose of selecting a larger area is.
Ctrl-A could also be used to select a whole sheet to unhide all columns or rows. So there are uses for that too.
We are now checking with the user if more than 10000 copies of the original are to be pasted. This problem has been fixed in the development version. The fix will be available in the next major software release. Thank you for your bug report.