GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 61650
autofill support for 2Q2001 and friends
Last modified: 2006-04-13 16:21:59 UTC
Excel seems to use pattern-matching heuristics when autofilling ranges. It looks like the gnumeric code is not quite so smart yet. The one I particularly noticed as missing is that Gnumeric generates 1Q01, 2Q01, 3Q01, 4Q01, 5Q01, ... This is a pretty standard abbreviations for quarters of a year in financial spreadsheets. The correct fill ought to be 3Q01, 4Q01, 1Q02, ... Similarly for 1H01, 2H01, 1H02, ... Arguably you should also auto-fill A, B, C, D to continue E, F, G, ... At the moment it just repeats the selected cell. Perhaps you could eventually have a dialog through which the patterns could be configured, if the macro language is powerful enough to allow the expansions to be concisely expressed. Gnumeric seems to be coming along so nicely. Good work!
It is probably more work than it is worth to support additional autofill heuristics via plugins. However, adding this is pretty simple. My only quandry would be how to internationalize it. What letter do people use 3Q2000 in other languages.
You're probably right about it being more work than it is worth. However it might still be nice to provide some kind of documentation of what fill methods are available. In Excel it seems the only way to know is to try it and see what happens, which I guess is OK. Alternatively (and I know I'm probably over-engineering here) it could pop up a menu if there is more than one possibility. I am not sufficiently familiar with any other language to know what will happen. However I suspect you may have to take locale into account, e.g. when filling with dates (m/d/y vs d/m/y), or month names.
Fixed in the development version. The fix will be available in the next major release. Thank you for your bug report. I added 3Q01, 4Q01, 1Q02, ... The new autofill setup makes this fairly simple. There's no telling how people want it translated though.