I never noticed that because whenever I autofill I do that by first
selecting the first cell and then dragging the autofill handle across
the range. This will overwrite everything in the range.

In the edit->fill->autofill version it does not refuse to overwrite
cells but it does not work with single cells: say 
A1:A15 are 1...15
B1     is  =A1*A1
B5     is  =34
selecting B1:B15 and choosing autofill will assume that B1:B5 is the
source and it will copy that into the next blocks of five cells, so B6
becomes =A6*A6 and B10 becomes 34...

If you have content in the whole range it will use the whole range as
its source and so nothing happens.

Perhaps we nee a second autofill menu item: "autofill from single cell"

Thanks for your explanation -- that makes a lot more sense now.

Hmm, I can see how the current behaviour could be very useful.  But in
the case where the cells that are copied are the whole range, Autofill
becomes a no-op, which is pretty useless, so perhaps in that case the
behaviour could change to do "Copy from first cell(s)".  That will
duplicate/merge most of the behaviour of both systems.

Selecting the first cell and dragging the corner down becomes
impractical when you have thousands of rows of the same formula.

Somehow though I kind of like the simplicity and explicitness of
Excel's "Copy Right" (Ctrl-R) / "Copy Down" (Ctrl-D) functions.  The
ability to overwrite what's already there is pretty important to
working efficiently with large numbers of formulae that change
frequently (e.g. during prototyping of a complex spreadsheet). 
Perhaps those two explicit options could be added to the Fill submenu
too (it's a small submenu anyway).

Copy Down/Right have been implemented in cvs.  They will overwrite anything in
the target cell, possibly excluding comments.

Where does one find Copy Down/Right?

Keys Ctrl-D and Ctrl-R only.  ("Copy down" is more like "copy from cell above",
btw.)

I think we should ahve some neun item for these. They seem to be quite useful.

I guess I can't type. This was supposed to be:

I think we should have some menu items for these.

If this will get into toolbars or menus somehow, please change the description.
I've struggled with translating the labels for this (Copy Down, Copy Right) and
had a look at the sources. At this point I've got some self-doubts. But
fortunatly found this one... ;)

So it would be better to name this "Copy from left" and "Copy from above". At
least a comment for translators would be nice.

Yes, another great (mis-)feature of the English language :-)  It really means
(as you figured out from the source), "Copy to all cells in the Down/Right
direction", not "Copy the thing called 'Down'/'Right'".  The only way the
meaning is not ambiguous is that only one of the two possible interpretations in
English makes sense...  We should all give up on English and use source code to
communicate instead :-)

This feature originated in Excel, where the shortcuts are the (unfortunately
unlocalizable) Ctrl-D and Ctrl-R.  It is a feature used by a lot of people. 
Perhaps a better name though is "Fill Down" and "Fill to Right".  That way their
English names will still match the shortcuts that a lot of migrating Excel users
use.  "Copy from left" doesn't match Ctrl-R very well -- but perhaps us English
speakers need to learn to deal with non-mnemonic keyboard shortcuts, like the
rest of the non-English speaking world has forced on them by us insensitive
English speakers :-(

There seems to be a strange problem with Ctrl-R and Ctrl-D.  I type on a Dvorak
keyboard, and I have seen one Gnumeric installation where Ctrl + the actual R
key (which is bound to P on Dvorak) works for copy-right, as well as Ctrl-R
(where R is bound to the O key).  The same happens for Ctrl-D: the H key is
bound to D on Dvorak.

This creates a problem, because Ctrl-P no longer works for Print, as it is
rebound to "Copy-Right".

In my current Gnumeric installation, I can't duplicate this problem (neither
Ctrl-R nor Ctrl-D works using either keyboard layout).  Ctrl-P does not print
either, and I think it is supposed to (unless this keyboard binding was
intentionally removed in the 1.4.x series?  I think it used to be there...)  It
doesn't even show Ctrl-P next to Print... in the menu.

 

Whatever the problem for the Dvorak keyboard was, it would be a gtk+ problem
and not a gnumeric problem.  You'll have to isolate and file under gtk+.

Ctrl-P was unintentionally lost of 1.4.x at some point and fixed here:

2005-03-12  Jon K Hellan  <hellan@acm.org>

	* src/wbcg-actions.c: Add <Ctrl>+P accelerator for print.

What is left here now that copy right/down is implemented ?

I don't think there's a UI for this (or even a mention in the menus), see
comment 5 - comment 8.  So there's no way for the user to know this exists
unless they are used to the Excel convention or look in the docs. 
(=>discoverability.)  The Fill menu is pretty small, two more options probably
won't hurt, especially given their usefulness and common usage among Excel users.

This is also either not functional or not present in 1.4.3, I'm assuming when it
was added to CVS on 2004-07-16 (Comment #3) that that was after the 1.5 branch,
so it is not intended to work in 1.4.x?  (I haven't tried 1.5.x recently.) 
Otherwise, other than the UI issue, I agree that there's nothing else to be
done.  Thanks!

Not sure why this bug was still in NEEDINFO state, presumably the state didn't change when I added Comment #13.

*** Bug 331469 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Ok, it seems that copy-down in Excel has two different functions.

1. The one we have: copy from the cell above.
2. When more that one row is selected, it copies the top one into the rest.

I guess we can do 2 without too much hassle.
--> enhancement.

(In reply to comment #16)
> Ok, it seems that copy-down in Excel has two different functions.
> 1. The one we have: copy from the cell above.
> 2. When more that one row is selected, it copies the top one into the rest.

As far as I can work out, for copy down (Control-D), Excel's behaviour is (tested in Excel 2003):

1) If the selection is a single area, and this single area consists of a single row, and this is not the top row: copy into each cell in the selection the expression in the cell immediately above it.

2) If not, for each column in the selection, copy the expression in the topmost cell in the selection into all other selected cells in that column (even if the selections are non-contiguous).

For copy right (Control-R) this all works exactly the same, except rotated 90 degrees anticlockwise.

This generally does what you'd expect it to -- select a single row and it copies from above it; select multiple rows and it copies the top row downwards.

I think the best behaviour could go a little beyond Excel's by choosing to copy from above the selection if the selection has multiple areas, but all are in a single row (e.g. selecting A3 and C3 and hitting Control-D would copy the values from A2 and C2 into them).  Maybe you could go even further by still copying from the cell above if there are multiple rows in the selection, but no column has more than one row selected (but that might start to get a bit non-intuitive).

At the moment Gnumeric's copy down/right only works if a single cell is selected.  This is definitely in need of improvement -- for me Control-D and Control-R are the instinctive way of copying formulas around, and they don't work most of the time.

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.