Cannot paste filtered data into new column

a1s3f5h7 · April 26, 2021, 6:17pm

Hi all:

I’m running 7.0.5.2 on Win10. Have already installed the ‘copy visible cells’ extension.
Working on a larger data set in Calc and finally ran into an issue that’s making me miss Excel.

The situation:
Column A contains text data that’s being pulled via VLOOKUP. Column A has also been filtered to exclude certain results.
Now that I’ve filtered down to what I need, I want to copy this filtered data and paste it into a separate sheet to perform additional analysis.

The issue:
When I try to copy/paste my filtered data out of Column A and into Sheet B, I run into the “insert into multiple selection not possible” error.

What I’ve tried so far:

The ‘copy visible cells’ extension seems to not work
Changing data formats to ensure consistency hasn’t done anything
Pasting unformatted text vs values doesn’t get around the issue

I’m very surprised to find a lack of documentation on this issue. I’ve found a few bug tracker entries that are 10+ years old and a couple of very short posts about this (none resolved), but considering this is basic spreadsheet functionality I’m not sure how else to proceed but to switch back to Excel. Can anyone help me resolve this issue?

mariosv · January 29, 2024, 10:01pm

ediwixnj · January 29, 2024, 9:30am

It’s Jan 2024, I am on Linux Mint, LO version is 7.6.4.1.

This issue is still present. Simple to reproduce, if you have data with empty cells and wish to remove the empty cells but not sort the data, you would use a standard filter and filter for value “not empty”.

But it breaks when you select the filtered data and try to copy and paste into an adjacent column.

The reason for this failure is that Calc takes the spreadsheet filtering very seriously, the filter applies to all rows on the sheet, so when you go to paste your data into an adjacent column, Calc is trying to paste into the same rows the data comes from and this results in a non-continuous target range and thus it throws the error.

The solution is very simple. You need to paste into a non-filtered sheet. So make a new blank sheet and past into that, and it works fine.

Hope this helps.