This seems like new behavior in 7.5.5.2 or one of the more recent releases:
Create a blank calc spreadsheet, fill a few cells with some random text. The new text will be in the default font:
Select all cells using Crtl-A, by clicking in the box in the corner of the row/column headers, etc.
Increase the font size using format bar, Format->Cells, etc:
Only the cells with text in them are resized, blank cells retain the default font size:
I seem to remember that not long ago the behavior was that resizing fonts for âallâ cells used to change the default font size for empty cells as well.
Am I mistaken? If this has been Calcâs behavior all along then Iâm OK with this, I can just change the default font for new cells some other way.
No clue then. Why should 7.5.5.2 have a bug neither found in 7.5.3.2 nor in 7.6.0.0?
Concerning possible special problems with Fedora (or any Linux) I canât help. But I also canât imagine a reason in this case for a different behaviour.
See correction below.
I can reproduce the issue. However, I would never format a spreadsheet like that.
Hit F11, right-click cell style âDefaultâ and change formatting attributes. Then remove any hard formatting (Ctrl+M).
Sorry. There must have been a mistake with my previous testing.
Repeating the test I also get the issue under Win 10.
Clue: This seems to be a bug introduced with V7.4 when the maximum number of columns was increased (from 2^10 to 2^14) . My portable V7.3.6 doesnât show it.
With V7.5.3.2: If just the last column (XFD; number 16384) is excluded from the selection after Ctrl+A, or one of its cells is not blank, the changed cell attribute is applied as expected also to blank cells.
I think that itâs a new feature (maybe to avoid CPU or RAM usage).
In my screenshot below, initially only B2 and C4 has text.
After Select All, and changing font size, only the cell range (B2:C4) between those corner cells get the formatting.
So if you need to format a range of cells, make sure that at least one cell in the boundary rows and columns has a value.
I canât find out the bug report, I think this was a modification to avoid having the whole sheet with direct format, inadvertently, so only up to the last cell with data itâs modified.
It increases the file size, making slower save/open, Calc doesnât like too much the whole sheet with direct format.
That unearthed a ton more previously-hidden performance problems, so many optimizations were implemented.
For example, before, LibreOffice Calc used to save:
Formatting PER CELL.
Now, Calc can save:
Formatting PER ROW/COLUMN.
With a few thousand rows/columns, that previous method âworkedâ and âran okayâ, but your document would be full of:
A1 = 12pt font
A2 = 12pt font
[âŚ]
A1024 = 12pt font
but once LO enabled millions of cellsâit brought all CPUs to a complete crawl. Especially when many people would do like the OP:
Ctrl+A + Formatting
applying Direct Formatting onto millions of individual cells⌠but then only type actual info into a handful.
Now, using that row/column method mentioned above, Calc will save formatting similar to:
âMake Column A = 12pt fontâ
Now, instead of:
millions of completely blank cells all saying âmake it this font size!â
Calc now condenses all that formatting down to 1!
Side Note: LuboĹĄ LuĹĂĄk implemented this feature in ~2022 + did tons of Calc optimizations. He even gave a talk at Collaboraâs conference last year:
I claimed there was a bug and @erAck suggested (to a different user) such a report should be filed.
Nobody did, seemingly, and I wonât. I have >30 open bugs, and this one isnât important for me. Anyway I would reject any guess the change was intentional. Also mass-occurring direct cell formatting is handled efficiently by Cal (and .odf storage).
In addition: After Ctrl+A and de-selection of a single cell (A1 e.g.) the complete sheet (except A1) accepts the font attribute.
Jumbo Sheets is still something different, with 16 million rows, and itâs not default but experimental. 1M rows are supported for years already. The switch from 1k columns to 16k columns was made.
Not true, if talking about file format. Calc was always able to save formatting per column/row. The article talks about in memory representation, where formatting runs per column (over rows) was always implemented, but with increasing columns to 16k a different approach to individual columns had to be taken (and thatâs not only about formatting).
That was always exactly one formatting run within a column, not 1024 individual cell attributions.
The conclusion about Ctrl+A resulting in millions of individual formattings thus does not hold.
Itâs been quite a while since I read those linked posts/talks, so probably need a refresher myself through all those olâ bug reports + blog posts with fresh eyes!
