Currently there is no way to select all empty cells in given range. ^$ regexp in Find and Replace should find them, but it was intentionally disabled in some historical OOo release due to "performance issues" [1]. There are two things that should be considered: 1. Does these "performance issues" still apply on any fairly new hardware? 2. Can we safely assume, that user that does use regular expressions KNOWS what he is doing? I think that LO is a tool and should not think instead of user. If user wants to run resource-hungry query on large dataset, then he should be able to do it (and face performance penalty, if they applies). [1] http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/How_Tos/Regular_Expressions_in_Calc
It's an interesting thought. In some sense the empty cells don't really exist - at least, in general we try to ensure they do not (there used to be some exceptions for 'notes' and also the empty source cells for dependencies ie. do =A3 in A1 and A3 will have an invisible cell backing but these are filtered out too it seems). If you'd like to hack this - it shouldn't be -too- hard. I suspect we want to run the regexp on a single empty string the first time we hit an empty cell and then do some rather more optimised selection building - which (you might hope) should be reasonably efficient. But of course all that needs some hacking input I expect :-) the place to go is: sc/source/core/data/table6.cxx which shouldn't look (so) frightening I hope.
adding LibreOffice developer list as CC to unresolved EasyHacks for better visibility. see e.g. http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/minutes-of-ESC-call-td4076214.html for details
Removing comma from whiteboard (please use a space to delimit values in this field) https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Bugzilla/Fields/Whiteboard#Getting_Started
Migrating Whiteboard tags to Keywords: (EasyHack DifficultyInteresting SkillCpp) [NinjaEdit]
JanI is default CC for Easy Hacks (Add Jan; remove LibreOffice Dev List from CC) [NinjaEdit]
I would like to try this one.
(In reply to Mohammed Abdul Azeem from comment #6) > I would like to try this one. You are welcome, assign it to yourself, and follow our step by step guide: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/GetInvolved
Mohammed Abdul Azeem committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=69ac605191860aceee09f1147a5234222d1b3300 tdf#57523 - Regex search "^$" finds all empty cells in given range. It will be available in 5.2.0. The patch should be included in the daily builds available at http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More information about daily builds can be found at: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.
Seems solved
Xisco Fauli committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/bf72c4b4f84d6cd3322d4107e5b7b8bbc7911485 tdf#57523: sc: Add UItest It will be available in 7.2.0. The patch should be included in the daily builds available at https://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More information about daily builds can be found at: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.
Verified as fixed in: Version: 6.2.5.2 Build ID: 1ec314fa52f458adc18c4f025c545a4e8b22c159 CPU threads: 4; OS: Linux 5.4; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3; Locale: en-AU (en_AU.UTF-8); UI-Language: en-US Calc: threaded