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Bug 61650 - autofill support for 2Q2001 and friends
autofill support for 2Q2001 and friends
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Product: Gnumeric
Classification: Applications
Component: General
git master
Other All
: Low enhancement
: ---
Assigned To: Jody Goldberg
Jody Goldberg
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2001-10-03 09:41 UTC by Martin Pool
Modified: 2006-04-13 16:21 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description Martin Pool 2001-10-03 09:41:39 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!
Comment 1 Jody Goldberg 2001-10-08 06:45:41 UTC
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.
Comment 2 Martin Pool 2001-10-08 07:14:53 UTC
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.
Comment 3 Morten Welinder 2006-04-13 16:21:59 UTC
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.