Pearls of MOSSy Wisdom

Came across this little gem of a "feature" in MOSS today. 

One of my users wanted some information in one list to appear in another list.  Fine.  But these two lists were not even close to identical.  Now, one would think that if someone tried to copy a listitem from one list to another list and the columns didn't match then an error would occur.  One would think.  But here's what really happens: the columns in the source list that are not in the destination list are ADDED TO THE DESTINATION LIST!  What's worse is that the NewItem.aspx and EditItem.aspx pages are corrupted and only show the newly added columnns to use/edit.  And what is worse is that this copy/paste operation was done via Manage Content and Structure.  So it's very, very easy for a user to mistakenly do.  Here are the pics to show what happened.

First, I created two lists: SourceTest and DestinationTest.  In these lists I created three columns (Column1, Column2, and Column3 in SourceList and ColumnA, ColumnB, and ColumnC in DestinationList).  I then created an item in each list.

Using Manage Content & Structure, I copied the list item from SourceList to DestinationList.

The result shown shows the item is "copied" but the data is missing.  Why?

Because the AllItems view only shows the original columns.  But looking at the DestinationList after the copy shows that the mismatched columns were created in the DestinationList.

It gets worse.  Try to Create a New Item in DestinationList and all you get to add are the "New" columns from SourceList.