sometimes you have a formula that is going to be copied to a cell range, you can do it copying or dragging the initial cell to the cell range. this is how MS office works and Libre Office mimmic. It's fine. Enhancement example: write a formula in cell A1, select a cell range A2:Z800. and put a "pointer" to the initial formula A1 on each cell of the range A2:Z800. If you change the formula in A1 all the cell range A2:Z800 as pointing the same formula, will be updated automatically, so no need to drag over the cell range anymore. This allows to develope formula in A1 and see the results on the cell range. If you change the formula in E50, you drop the pointer to A1 and use that particular formula for E50. advantages: - faster formula develope write once, no drag or copy over the cell range each time the formula change. - no errors or different version of the formula on individual cells of the range. - the final file on disk would ocuppy less space, as you don't need to write the formula for each cell in the range, just the pointer to the original cell containing the formula. I's similar to the conditional formatting in MS excell 2010, but for cell formulas.
While this is a good idea which I will mark as NEW - it's quite hard to implement as there won't be compatibility with MSO and unfortunately, most users want this. If users begin to rely on this and then send the file to someone else who opens it with Excel, they wouldn't see the formula correctly and we would have some ticked off users saying that we shouldn't implement something that is broken in the "main" office suite. This is an ongoing debate/discussion, it's hard for us to move forward with good ideas that Microsoft Office is lacking if we encourage people to use LibreOffice by saying it's compatible with Microsoft Office . . . catch 22 I suppose. Thanks though for the suggestion. So - a developer very well might close this as WONTFIX but, it's valid enough for me to move to NEW.
Thanks to consider this idea. It's possible to keep the MSO compatibility on the file format, when saving the running file, exchanging the "pointer to formula" with the real formula saving the file in compatibility mode, using the "Pointer to Formula" only at RAM, that makes the app more productive and faster for users against MSO. This could keep the file compatible but take advantage at running time. That takes Libre Office an advantage over MSO, but still compatible with MSO. Doing like this, "catch 22" could be broken and wait for next MSO step. This could be an step forward on the productivity race against MSO.