Issue 57432

Created attachment 31225 [details]
Test Case: merged cells along the top to autofill

Platform: PC
OS: Windows 2000

Ok, I think I see what you are getting at. However, when I use autofill I find
that it just unmerges the destination cells. (This is a problem in and of
itself, but possibly not the same problem.)

Could you post step by step instructions that would allow us to duplicate the
bug from the file that you attached?

Thanks,

-Steve

Ok, I had to update my current document, because I added information and the
document changed. I'm going to start from where I am. The top cells were not
merged. So I merged cells A1 - D1, E1 - H1, and continued until I got to AB1.
They have dates in them. A1 - D1 has "11/12" in it. I clicked on the little box
at the bottom corner of the A1 - D1 cell and dragged it over the E1 - H1 cell.
While my mouse is hanging over cell E1 - H1, I notice the tool tip says says
"11/15" instead of of the expected "11/13".  At this point, I usually stopped
trying to put the date into the other cells.

I'm not sure if I ever bothered to drop the date in. I saw the tool tip and
assumed it would go in wrong. I may have done it and immediately pressed
"Ctrl-Z" to undo it. Either way I never noticed the rather strange phenomenon of
it splitting the next cell into which I dropped the date. 

To continue with my steps, if I let the date drop into the next cell, cell E1 -
H1, then it splits that cell back into the individual cells E1, F1, G1, and H1.
 That's not right either, though you can be the judge as to which is more wrong.

I would like to give my sincere appologies for dropping the ball on this. Things
have been rather busy with the holidays and all.

Thanks for looking into this for me! I love OpenOffice!

Confirmed - OOo 2.0, Windows XP SP2.

There's an easier way to replicate too...

1) Open a new spreadsheet
2) Merge cells A1-D1
3) Merge cells E1-H1
4) Enter a "1" in merged cell A1-D1
5) Drag to autofill from merged cell A1-D1 to merged cell E1-H1

After this, you will notice two things: (1) Cell E1-H1 has unmerged, splitting
back into four cells (E1, F1, G1, H1). (2) Cell E1 contains "5", not "2" as we
would expect.

So, Autofill does not recognize cells A1-D1 to be a single (merged cell), but
rather to be four cells. Same for merged cell E1-H1. Thus, when you try to drag
from merged cell A1-D1, it first starts at "4" (which would be the logical
contents of cell D1 if dragging a 1 from cell A1), then increments once for each
cell in the next merged cell, ending at 8 and splitting merged cell E1-H1.

Same thing happens vertically (using merged cells A1-A4, A5-A8)

Proper behaviour:
-OOo autofill should recognized a merged cell as a single cell.
-Perhaps autofill should only work with blocks of cells the same size as the
originating cell IE, it you couldn't drag a merged cell of size 3 into a merged
cell of size 4 or size 2. (This is how Excel does it, for example - attempting
to do otherwise generates the error message "This operation requires the merged
cells to be identically sized.")
-When dragging a merged cell onto unmerged cells, the unmerged cells should be
converted to merged cells of the appropriate size.

Confirming.

Steve

Though I hate to use Excel as a basis for functionality, I have to agree that
from a user perspective, this does seem to be the most intuitive way to proceed.
I found  the current functionality quite unexpected, even a little frustrating. 

I don't know if you were looking for additional input from me, but I thought I
should go ahead and put my vote in. Thanks!

Hi,

this effect was mentioned first in Issue 49414 and should have resulted in an
enhancement request. For now I can not find something about it, so this Issue
goes to requirements to evaluate.

Frank

Just, i need it ;)