Reader's question: inserting a row in multiple sheets? - OpenOffice.org Ninja

Reader's question: inserting a row in multiple sheets?

Posted by Andrew Z at Saturday, May 24, 2008 | Permalink

How would you help Kevin who writes in with the following problem?

I need an OpenOffice miracle. I transitioned a small public library from M$ to OO recently, and nearly everyone was receptive to it (save one older woman, who for reasons she can't articulate, just plain hates OO.) I've been able to overcome every problem until now; here's what's happening:

Evil old woman is in charge of the schedule. She uses OO Calc to organize a monthly schedule where each week is on a separate sheet. When she wants to insert a row into all four sheets, I tell her to highlight the four sheets and the row should automagically be inserted into all of them. Unfortunately, this doesn't work. Is there another (simple/elegant) method for inserting a row across multiple sheets?

I've searched the documentation for a solution, but most error reports that deal with this are from OO 1.0. Please help!

First, I checked myself in OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 and in Microsoft Excel 2003. Indeed Excel performs multi-sheet insert operations simultaneously, but OpenOffice.org does.

Second, I checked the Issue Tracker and found issues 17044 and 29849. The first one more closely matches Kevin's need. Both issues are marked version 1.x, which means they were discovered in those old versions. The 1.x doesn't necessarily mean these issues don't apply to 2.4.0, and based on my quick tests, nothing has changed since then. Both issues also have 0 votes, no target milestone, and no recent comments: that generally means there is little interest in implementing these feature requests, so don't hold your breath. If Kevin were to register in the Issue Tracker, he could add two votes per issue. Even if by a miracle some developer decided to implement the feature request today, it wouldn't make it in until OpenOffice.org 3.1 in December.

Based on the information so far, there is no direct way to do this in OpenOffice.org. Now, is there a workaround? What about recording a macro? Should OpenOffice.org emulate all of Microsoft Office? How important is user satisfaction? How could Kevin manage the human element of the problem? Give Kevin your advice by posting a comment.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Copy multiple seperated rows
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=25855

=> Target milestone: OOo 3.x

Another similar behaviour :
Paste into multiple cells
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=88306

=> Status: UNCONFIRMED

RTC said...

I wish I had an answer for the OO problem, but why is she doing scheduling in Calc? Why not use Google Calendar? She could create a calendar with all of that information and share it with everyone. Problem solved? Seems like the right tool for the job may be a better solution than reprogramming OO.

Anonymous said...

This is a reasonably common requirement in an intensive spreadsheeting environment. Calendar might be a better option for this specific requirement, but budgets for different regions etc is another example I've used this feature for. One of those obscure things that sometimes become really handy to have.

doub_l_helix said...

Whenever there was a feature lacking in an office application that feature could be programmed using the applications macro language. There should be a way to accomplish this in oobasic as a global module. If there is a way to capture the selected sheets and the selected rows/cols then the operation can be applied to the selected ranges using a key sequence. The code can then be installed in all the computers and training should include this. Seems a nice project.