Re: Auto-filling/Auto-formatting?

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2002 at 01:05:22PM -0500, Jack McKinney wrote:
> and are included for completeness.  Some of them are more reasonable
> (that having been said, does gnumeric need more developers?).
YES!

> 1. One column needs the value to be automatically filled with max(everything
>    above it in this column)+1.  I.e., it need the next unused integer.
>    Currently, I do this manually by sorting the above rows and then using
>    the last row's number+1.
I don't see any way to do this without resorting to scripting
This is too specific to be part of the general interface.

> 2. Two columns have functions in them with relative references, and these
>    functions need to be copied into the new rows.  I can just grab them
>    from the row above and copy them, but I was hoping there was a way to
>    tell gnumeric "always put foo into column C when a new row is added".
>    I can always prefill these columns down the page, but this is ugly for
>    two reasons: it violates "0, 1, or Infinity" and it causes small changes
>    to the spreadsheet to take nonproportional amount of time to recalculate.
I'm not at all clear what you mean here.  If you object to
replicating the expression you can name it (with the relative
references) and things will work as expected.  However, unless you
use array formulas (which have their own irritations) you can not
avoid copying things.

> 3. These rows represent recorded observations, and each row has a column to
>    indicate the date of the observation.  I'd like it to prefill with the
>    current date (which can then be corrected manually if the data point is
>    added much later than the observation).
This also sounds like the job for a macro.  There are accelerators
to insert current date/time, but that is not quite what you're
asking for.

However, you should note that you have the source for gnumeric.
Adding a command directly to the app is trivial.  So you can code up
the 'macro' in C right now.  Heck in the 1.1.x version you can even
put it in a plugin.

>     Is any of this doable in gnumeric presently, or planned soon.  Especially
> if not, please see my parenthetical remark before the enumerated list 8-).
Better support for list validation is defiitely planned.  Anyone
interested in having a look ?