GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 127144
Opening a workbook multiple times without warning is dangerous
Last modified: 2006-04-19 20:42:46 UTC
Basically, opening multiple instances of the same workbook in read-write mode is likely to cause data loss at some point in time, at least without warning the users. This already happened a couple of times to me, especially with a workbook I have a shortcut to on the panel. I think that Excel provides a warning message and suggests to open the new instance in read-only mode. Maybe, we should have such a warning dialog too?
I don't think this is a bug but in fact the preferred behaviour: it is none of gnumeric's business to try to determine whether another application (including a different instance of gnumeric) has already open another file. For consistence this would have to include the case that the same instance has already opened the file. I could envision a warning message on save if the file on disk has potentially been changed since the last save or open, say since the modification date changed.
I agree that this is technically not a bug, though it is an area where more user-friendliness might be helpful to the users. I have verfied Excel's behaviour and they indeed provide a warning message when opening. I suggest doing the same thing (when opening instead of saving) because a user might already have lost track of what was changed in which instance of the workbook, e.g. some changes here, some changes there; in that case providing a warning at the end is obviously useless.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 334024 ***