Manage Calc Cell Name: Global Or By Sheet

Recent Calc versions seem to allow cell names to be defined either to document scope or only a sheet. Prior versions only allowed one cell name per document. No repeats.

I have a large excel spreadsheet provided by a third party. They use cell names and I have a second spreadsheet that has DDE links pulling data from the third party spreadsheet. All DDE links in the 2nd one depend on the 1st file’s names to be global, but recent versions of calc are now seeing these names as per sheet.

Is there a way to have calc assume all names are global? Thank you!
Paul

@JohnSUN – sounds like this might be your area of expertise :slight_smile:

@qubit1 - No, I can’t help - I do not understand what the problem is. Unable to repeat the situation by this description. All the names in my test xls-file are global in different versions of LibreOffice. Perhaps it is an another format Excel-file? Or failure associated with setting up the profile? I don’t know, sorry.

Hey this very much sounds like a bug. Can you please open a bug report with detailed instructions and a test case.

Hi @PaulK,

Here’s the link for filing a bug.

Please provide a list of steps that can reproduce your problem. The QA Team and devs like moggi will be happy to help you track down this issue!

Please post a link to any bugs you file in a comment below using the format “fdo#123456”.

Thanks!

Let me see if I can explain this differently. I don’t believe it’s a bug, but I need to know the format to link cell name data when cell name is set to “Sheet” focus.

If you open a Libreoffice Calc v.3.4.ish spreadsheet and look toward the upper left side of the window, there is a field for cell location which Help Tips labels as “Name Box” defaulting to the format of ColumnRow, i.e. A1.

On this version (3.4.xx) this name box data, when entering text, is considered global to the spreadsheet file. In other words, a text name in this field, other than the ColumnRow format, could not be duplicated on any sheet within this spreadsheet file. I would link these cells to a different spreadsheet file with the format:

=DDE(“soffice”,“C:\programdata\spreadsheet.ods”,“CELLNAME”)

This =DDE entry is assuming the “CELLNAME” as global. I have pre existing files, supplied by a third part source, that use cell names.

If I use a Calc v4.0.2.2 installation and open a spreadsheet, this cell name field now has a downward pointing arrow button just the right of this field. Entering data in this field seems to require setting the focus to either global or sheet. The older Calc versions did not seem to offer this flexibility and seemed to assume global.

Now, all links do not work because my “=DDE(“soffice”,“C:\programdata\spreadsheet.ods”,“CELLNAME”)” does not specify a specific sheet and the third party file’s cell names NOW are considered as sheet focus.

My question is: What DDE format can I use to access the cell by name and specify the sheet. Also, what may be the best way to replace these links as I have 100’s of link entries?

Thank you very much…
Paul

Submitted a bug: EDITING: DDE function does not work with Name Ranges with Local Scope

Anyone have a solution?