Bug 135825 - PIVOTTABLE: unintuitive referencing in copying sheets
Summary: PIVOTTABLE: unintuitive referencing in copying sheets
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Calc (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
unspecified
Hardware: All Linux (All)
: medium normal
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
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Keywords:
: 167217 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks: Pivot-Table
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Reported: 2020-08-17 07:05 UTC by Lyndon Brown
Modified: 2025-06-26 09:57 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

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Description Lyndon Brown 2020-08-17 07:05:23 UTC 
Description:
if you create a pivot table in the same sheet as the data it is based upon, then copy the sheet, the sheet name in the 'destination' reference is changed to point to the new sheet, while 'source' remains referring to the copied-from sheet.

why? this seems totally wrong to me.

we have copied both the data and the pivot table based on it into our duplicate sheet, and surely common intuition is that the right thing to do in this situation is for the duplicated pivot table to point to the duplicated data as its source...

that's certainly what i expected in the document i created recently (attached to bug #135821), where i was doing a lot of copying and adjusting of sheets. it was an annoying waste of my time to have to go in and manually edit the tables in each instance (especially wrt. bug #133124, and alongside copying with the issues of #135821).

Actual Results:
 

Expected Results:
 


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: No


OpenGL enabled: Yes

Additional Info:
Version: 7.0.1.1.0+
Build ID: <buildversion>
CPU threads: 4; OS: Linux 5.7; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: en-GB (en_GB.utf8); UI: en-GB
Debian package version: 1:7.0.1_rc1-1
Calc: threaded
Comment 1 Roman Kuznetsov 2020-08-26 06:44:41 UTC 
I confirm that behavior in 7.1, but...

I'm not sure it's a bug. Mike, Kohei can you say your opinion here?
Comment 2 Mike Kaganski 2020-08-26 06:55:08 UTC 
IMO this is a UX question. We have multiple similar cases of varying complexity (behaviour on copy of formulas with relative/absolute addresses; pivot tables; charts; named and automatic ranges; ...). I don't know if there's some formal conceptual description of the behaviour on these, so that it would make clear why current decision is taken. Anyway, IIUC technically it's possible to do either way, and it's just requires consensus and then manhours :-)
Comment 3 Heiko Tietze 2021-04-06 14:04:44 UTC 
The source of the pivot table is $Sheet1.$A$1:$B$5 to deal with the fact that it usually goes into another sheet. Destination is $Sheet1.$A$10 or so, and we have to modify this on copy/move.

What I could imagine in case of pivot tables on the same sheet, is to drop this part from the source and use just $A$1:$B$5. But for some reason changing this on Sheet1 seems to be possible manually but does actually inserts Sheet1_2.
Comment 4 Heiko Tietze 2021-04-15 07:23:02 UTC 
No further input, so let's do it an omit $Sheet when creating on the same sheet.
Comment 5 QA Administrators 2023-04-16 03:24:45 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 6 QA Administrators 2025-04-16 03:11:00 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 7 m_a_riosv 2025-06-26 09:57:51 UTC 
*** Bug 167217 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***