I’m struggling with making a fairly basic table within LayOut.
I tried first copying it in from Excel, but it pasted with the incorrect fonts, column and row sizes. I haven’t been able to adjust the rows (the table goes into a strange editing mode where the sizes of everything change a lot).
So then I create a fresh tableusing LayOut’s table tool and I need to manually enter every cell. That would normally take a few minutes, but LayOut is VERY slow to enter text or make any changes. Like 0.5 to 1 second delay per character. Longer text,such as a few words, may take 2 seconds.
The troubling part is that when I enter a sequence of characters, I need to pause after every character otherwise the order will change. For example “1234” will become “2134”. It also seems to pause and load up to 3 seconds each time I enter some text more than a few characters. During this time Ive noticed my CPU working hard.
This has happened several times in many different cells and is quite worrying because it can lead to serious errors that affect our work!!
Is this normal?
are there any suggestions to speed up the response time?
Any suggestions for copying excel data into LayOut while still being able to reformat it??
btw, I’m using a fast PC, small SKP and LO file (20mb), only a few pages, a small table, and saved locally. Restarting Layout didnt help.
After a bit of fiddling aorund and breaking my main table in to different tabs, I managed to get it to work - certainly easier than doing it manually!
I noticed it first referenced and rendered an earlier version of the excel table (depsite my saving over it) and LO reference needed to be updated.
So I wonder if LO should do an auto-update as soon as it’s entered so solve that issue.
In my case the differences between versions were easy to spot, but if it was just one figure in a large table, somebody might miss that.
Hadn’t realised you could have .xlsx files referenced for tables in LO. Thanks very much @DaveR for this!
This doesn’t answer the question still hanging for me though: Why is native table editing slow/laggy in LO? I wouldn’t have thought double clicking to enter and edit a cell would be too demanding on compute power.
While I’m mentioning it, double clicking to enter and edit any group, textbox or label in LO has a noticeable micro lag that I have just had to become accustomed to. Is there anyway of improving this?
Text is generally very sluggish in LayOut and it gets bad if you have too much text on the screen at one time or too much text in a single element (a table or note)
I was beginning to test whether this slowness gets worse if certain fonts or style settings are used, for example Bold or using Bulletpoints. Styled tables seem particularly slow.
I keep all my settings to a minimum. You really can’t afford to restyle text boxes in LayOut, since the formatting is lost every time you make a change in Excel.
LayOut is just not optimised for text, unfortunately.
In fact it feels like it’s not particularly well optimised for anything - vector edges, text, or raster images!
I don’t see this happening, I have Style unticked in Excel Reference Options…
I’ve just tested this because I’ve taken it for granted that Excel ( actually I use LibreOffice Calc ) does not override my Layout table styles.
So, if I have Styleticked, any table styles I have in Layout get overridden and I then have to reapply my styles, with Styleunticked and there is no overriding of styles.
i tend to use a few formatting features within excel such as highlighted cells and text, different line weights etc which means i seem to spend a fair bit of time formatting (and reformatting) tables. … i need some excel formatting and some Layout formatting, combined.
It’d be grand if LO imported ALL the excel styles.
