Copy and Paste in the Grid Editor

The selection in the grid is a bit complex relative to the selection in a text component. It consists of a current selected cell and additional selected cells. These additional cells are either hand picked by the user using the mouse, or are implied by the current selected cell. To be more specific, let's consider you click the name of the column - this becomes the current selected cell, but the editor automatically extends the selection so that it contains all the cells from that column. The current selected cell is painted with a color that is different from the rest of the selection.

You can select discontinuous regions of nodes and place them in the clipboard using the copy action. Pasting these nodes relative to the current selected cell may be done in two ways: just below (after) as a brother, which is the default behavior, or as the last child of the selected cell.

The Paste as Child action is available in the contextual menu.

The same action can be found in the menu Document > Grid Edit > Paste as Child.

The copied nodes from the grid can also be pasted into the text editor or other applications. When copying from grid into the text editor or other text based applications the inserted string represents the nodes serialization. The nodes from tables can be copied using HTML or RTF in table format. The resulting cells contain only the concatenated values of the text nodes.

Copying from grid to other editors

In the grid editor you can paste wellformed xml content or tab separated values from other editors. If you paste xml content the result will be the insertion of the nodes obtained by parsing this content.

Copying XML data into grid

If the pasted text contains multiple lines of tab separated values it can be considered as a matrix of values. By pasting this matrix of values into the grid editor the result will be a matrix of cells. If the operation is performed inside existing cells, the existing values will be overwritten and new cells will be created when needed. This is useful for example when trying to transfer data from Excel like editors into the grid editor.

Copying tab separated values into grid