spreadsheet of 49Mb creates a desktop link of 49Mb ! ! !
Hmm… are you telling that your spreadsheet does something without your consent? I get a feeling that your spreadsheet creates some “link” somewhere by itself… or not?
Possibly it’s you who created something (what?) using some steps (which?) on some unknown OS (which?), then see something (what?), and somehow related all that to LibreOffice (why?) of unknown version (which?)…
Please improve the question to make it understandable - and thus answerable.
(I think that you simply copy the spreadsheet to the desktop, instead of creating a link; or that you see a tooltip telling you the size of linked object, not of the link itself…)
What is a link?
That depends on your system.
- A link on file system level (hard link, symbolic link) is an alternative entry point to the file, equivalent to the original entry for all practical purposes (including size and time/date info)
- A link on operating system level is an independent file, with its own size and time/date info, containing information about the location of the originating file.
Situation on different platforms
- Unix/Linux systems (at least on the level I have used them) default to file system links.
- Windows default to OS dependent link files, and file system links have not really been an option to the average user. (AFAIK, this is about to change with recent Win10 development.)
- MacOS is built on top of a BSD-Unix framework. I am not sure which strategy is in use there.
So, for Windows your situation looks strange (unless you are on the latest developer build), and for Linux (and possibly MacOS) it may be business as usual.
hi - a link is what is called a shortcut in MS Windows - in Linux Mint Libre Office Calc and I think any program a link can be made by right clicking any file for context menu drop down and then going down the list to item “Make Link” - click it and a shortcut / link is made. It can then be dragged onto the Desktop/ Desktop folder. In Nemo the file manager for my version of Linux Mint it shows that the link is the same size as the original file. That’s what I mean when I say 'surely this is not correct.
Hello @andy-andyo,
The problem is with Nemo and other Linux file managers. It is displaying the size of the linked file and not the size of the link itself.
You can view the file size from a terminal. Enter:
ls -l Desktop
This will provide details, including size, on the files. For a description of column contents see this post → Basic Usage of ‘ls’ Command in Linux With Examples
You will see the link is quite small.
Edit:
This has nothing to do with LO. It is an OS situation.
After some thought, displaying the size of the linked file is beneficial as you may have the same named file of different sizes in different locations. What is missing in these file managers is the ability to see the link size AND the linked to file size.
Surely this is correct in the Linux world. Some file manager applications will show the size required by a symbolic link, while others (most of them, in my limited experience) will show the size of the linked file. Even when you go directly to the desktop, files and links there are delivered by the “core” file manager and information will be available according to that.
There should still be an indicator on the file icon to show that this is a “secondary” link.
Hi - The only solution is to bring up Nemo file manager and select Home then right click on the Desktop Folder, then select Properties at the bottom of the drop down menu. This shows that the files on/in the Desktop folder only total a few kilobytes and not the total file sizes which the links connect.
My concern was that the Desktop would become overburdened by the file sizes and slow my laptop down to a crawl. Having found that there are only a few kilobytes on my Desktop, I am relieved.
This issue was always a big thing with MS Windows where the more icons on the desktop the slower the pc would boot and file manager would work, - pretty crummy eh?. Don’t use MS Windows anymore and never will.