copy sheet (big table) from calc to writer

towsonu2003 · General User Joined: 22 Sep 2005 Posts: 28

I couldn't do the research prior to posting this, as I couldn't come up with the correct words I guess.

Basically, I have a table in calc. It is about 3 pages long... I need to copy - paste it to writer. Now, the under-1-page documents are easy to past, but when I try to paste this big table, instead of being spread over 3 pages, writer makes it small enough to fit into one page. And it looks creepy and I don't think my thesis committe would like it Wink

Is there a way to paste this correctly?

My workaround was to convert shreadsheet to pdf, use pdftoppm to convert it to ppm (each page as one ppm) and ppmtojpeg to convert it to jpg picture. Then I just inserted it to the place I wanted. It isn't very practical though...

Thanks for any pointers in advance.

Hagar Delest · Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2006 11:37 pm Post subject:

If you simply past it, it is considered as a calc sheet, not always a very good choice. In your case, as you certainly don't need to have many updates between calc sheet and your text, you should past it as HTML (long click on the paste button or clic on the arrow).
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towsonu2003 · General User Joined: 22 Sep 2005 Posts: 28

Hagar Delest · Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2006 12:20 am Post subject:

Past icon must have been improved from 1.9 to 2.0.1.

DDE link only works with windows. See the OOo Help for DDE link to have more information. If you want to keep the possibility of updating a table, it's better than HTML past (and it does not fit the table on a single page like calc past).

I'd had some bad experience with DDE links but I just tried it and it looked fine. I'll try to use it again.
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towsonu2003 · General User Joined: 22 Sep 2005 Posts: 28

For anyone interested or having the same problem, I was not able to resolve my issue. The following link goes to an enhancement issue filed with OOo issuezilla: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=63175

This is unfortunately a show stopper for me, bc I am required to embed long complicated calc tables (spanning for pages at once, does not have formulas but format is crucial) into very long and constantly revised writer files.

acknak · Posted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 6:55 pm Post subject:

I took a shot at it; here's what I came up with:
http://www.mytempdir.com/517245
Is that somewhere close?
Anyway, I agree that the copy/paste from Calc to Writer should be improved, but I'm not convinced that it's so terribly crucial, since the goals of a spreadsheet and a text document are usually quite different. E.g, I may use color in a spreadsheet because I work with it on my screen; the same data in a Writer table would have to be b&w or grayscale, as it's usually not practical (or necessary) to print in color. I've never really wanted to copy anything from a spreadsheet except the data, which I'm happy to re-format for my document. If I have a more text-oriented table, I just do it in Writer to begin with. Writer can do simple calculations in it's tables, and if necessary, I copy and paste to Calc to do a quick calculation.
However, I don't know what your situation is and you may need something I've not run into.

towsonu2003 · General User Joined: 22 Sep 2005 Posts: 28

I see that you are not used to the effortless interplay / interoperability between excel and word. Usually, this feature will be useful when the table tools in writer will be insufficient for your needs, especially when having to put a long and complex-formatted calc table into a long writer text.

The feature in question is definitely a show stopper for my current and future needs and I ended up installing word and excel using wine (which doesn't work well) and then qemu (which works much better but very slow).

Also, from a professional perspective (my current job), having to manually format tables I do in calc and paste into writer would eat up most of my work hours...