copy/paste error from excel

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copy/paste error from excel Will Thompson  2021-01-29 05:25
 

Hi Skyline Team
On Windows 10 machines it seems when i copy/paste from excel into the document grid (for instance when pasting a small set of values for calibration standards), the 'receiving' column in Skyline document grid skips a row between all the values. So it pastes all the values, but it will leave an empty row between every value, so only the first one is in the right place and the rest are in the incorrect location. Its really annoying to not be able to copy and paste a list of values. :) Verified on two different machines. Can you verify?

Thank you

Will

 
 
Nick Shulman responded:  2021-01-29 05:45
This has never happened to me.

This might depend on the exact data that you are copying form Excel. Can you send me your Excel spreadsheet?
I imagine it is possible that the values in some of the cells in your spreadsheet really do have line breaks in them (although if the Document Grid paste code was getting confused by that, you would probably see unmatched quote characters (") showing up in some cell values when you did the paste).

It might help if I could see a screenshot of what you are seeing, and your sky.zip file. Also, if you're pasting into a Report that you designed yourself, it would be good for me to see the report definition. You can make it so that the report definition is included in your .sky.zip by going to "Settings > Document Settings > Reports" and checking its checkbox.
-- Nick
 
Will Thompson responded:  2021-01-29 06:28
I have tried multiple (new) excel documents, multiple skyline documents, etc. Its not document dependent. If i just open a brand new skyline doc, import some data, and open document grid and paste any list from excel, it happens. If it isn't happening on your end at all with -daily, then i'm going to assume it is windows-configuration related and not your problem. Was just looking for you to give it a quick go in the current -daily on any random document, and if it doesn't happen to you then i'll start digging into configuration issues. Just noticed that it even happens when i ctrl+c / ctrl+v even within the same document grid (from one spot in the grid to another spot in the grid). If you still think a document from one of these computers would help you to point me in the right direction, i can send. Otherwise if its not happening on your end I'll file it under "not your problem".

Thanks
W
 
Nick Shulman responded:  2021-01-29 06:50
What happens when you copy from the Document Grid and paste into Notepad (or Notepad++, which gives you the ability to make special characters visible such as carriage return and line feed)?

The only way that I could imagine getting the behavior that you are seeing is that there really are extra blank lines in the text that is on the clipboard. The Document Grid is looking at the same text format on the clipboard that Notepad sees. It is not looking at any sort of special tabular data format or anything. The Document Grid looks at the text and expects it to be delimited with tabs and line breaks, and if there are any special characters within a cell value, the cell value is surrounded by quotes.

The following are all interpreted as a single line break:
CRLF
CR
LF
If, for some reason, the carriage return and linefeed characters were reversed ("LFCR"), that would be interpreted as two line breaks. I cannot imagine any reason that a Windows computer would ever produce something like that.

If you send me a screenshot I might see a clue as to what is going on.
-- Nick
 
Brendan MacLean responded:  2021-01-29 10:10
Note that what you describe is suggested in the Processing Grouped Study Data tutorial:

https://skyline.ms/tutorial_grouped.url

on page 51:

https://skyline.ms/_webdav/home/software/Skyline/@files/tutorials/GroupedStudies1-3_1.pdf#page=51

Although, this version of the tutorial was written on Windows 7, I have taught this numerous times at live Skyline courses/workshops and never run into what you are describing pasting from Excel into the Document Grid to set replicate annotations.

I suppose it could be something new in the very recent version of Office 365. As Nick suggests, it seems like we are going to need to get down to the byte by byte level of what is on the clipboard that Skyline is interpreting different from what is expected.

Thanks for reporting it and helping us figure out the source of the issue.

--Brendan