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Import from Exel Clipboard with time format

Posted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 4:05 am
by joma
Suggest, you have the following columns in excel:
2:10 1
2:20 2
2:30 3
2:40 2
This is time and number

Drawing a diagram from these data via the excel plugin works fine, but putting these both columns into the clipboard and inserting them into an open Dplot via paste results in an error message: "Error reading numbers from Clipboard."

:( JO

Posted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 9:53 am
by DPlotAdmin
The short answer is "use the Add-In"

The longer answer is - Copy/Paste doesn't work well for anything but numbers and has limitations with numbers, too. Most applications (and especially Excel) place data in a variety of formats on the clipboard when you 'Copy' it. Currently DPlot only grabs text from the clipboard, which consists of your Excel data exactly as it appears on the spreadsheet. I could spend a lot of time writing code to parse clipboard text, but it would still be unsatisfactory because it would only be working with the data as it is formatted. For example if your time values included seconds but were formatted as "hh:mm" then the seconds would be lost. A better solution, and one that will be added eventually, is to add support for Excel's BIFF clipboard format. BIFF passes all numbers as they are stored internally in Excel. This change was on the front burner for a while but became less important when the Add-In was created.