GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 395631
Pasting single-line tab-delimited text string gets interpreted literally
Last modified: 2011-02-22 17:51:28 UTC
Many data analysis programs put tab-delimited text into the clipboard, for easy pasting into a spreadsheet program. Gnumeric does not appear to interpret the tabs as field delimiters. When pasting in the data, the entire string gets pasted into a single cell. For this reason alone I cannot use Gnumeric in my day to day work, even though I would like to. It is faster than OpenOffice.org Calc, among other attractive features.
You get the text importer when you paste something with a newline in it. How do you propose distinguishing between someone who wants to paste a string with tabs into gnumeric and someone who wants to get a number of fields?
It is my experience that spreadsheet programs generally interpret tab characters as field delimiters. Excel and OpenOffice.org Calc behave this way. I just expected Gnumeric to behave the same way. In my humble opinion, it is very rare that anyone would want to include tab characters in spreadsheet cells. For the times when someone wants to do that, an alternate option might be a "Paste Special" or "Edit Cell Contents" command. As for the text importer, it turns a simple task into a three step process that requires excessive interaction. In other spreadsheet programs, I can simply press Ctrl+V to paste a row of fields, and move on to the next task.
Morten, if I wanted to paste a string with tabs I would do the same as when pasting a string with newlines, I first start editing a cell. If I paste directly I would expect the import dialog to come up for newlines (as it does) and tabs (as it doesn't). Now, it would be nice if we had "paste csv" and "paste tsv" to paste comma or tab separated text with possible newlines directly into a document.
That would be in text_to_cell_region in gui-clipboard.c If you feel strongly enough about fixing this, please pull the logic out into a separate function. I don't really like creating a config option for something this trivial -- yes, we make an assumption about what the user wants, but work can get done even if we make the wrong guess.
I agree that a config option would not be appropriate. One can always paste directly into a cell by starting to edit a cell first.
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.