[Libreoffice] Calc usability improvements

[Kohei Yoshida]

Hello Santiago,

On Mon, 2010-11-15 at 16:04 -0300, Santiago Bosio wrote:
> El 15/11/10 11:47, Kohei Yoshida escribió:

> > So, just to summarize this thread, we have three possible options for
> > this:
> >
> > 1) no changes,
> > 2) change the polarity of the current dialog so that the user *unchecks*
> > the check box to dismiss future popups of the dialog, or
> > 3) remove this entirely.
> >
> > And based on how I read all the inputs on this thread, 2) is the
> > preferred solution by the vast majority of people.
> >
> > Is this a fair assessment?  If so, I'd say let's make this change on the
> > master branch.
> 
> I just want to remind something that come to my mind while reading this. 
> This annoying dialog was introduced in OOo because it lacked the ability 
> to paste only to the visible cells. Thus, when you have hidden rows 
> and/or columns, and select a range to paste, hidden cells get its 
> contents replaced.

Ah!  It's certainly nice to know the rationale behind this popup.  It
brings more context to this subject. :-)

> This dialog was sort of a temp solution until the "paste only to visible 
> cells" feature get implemented. I don't know if it was ever implemented 
> or not, I think it isn't, but would be a great feature to add, thus 
> giving the possibility to get rid of that dialog once and for all.

I can tell you that you can now paste only to visible cells if those
invisible cells were *filtered out* by autofilter, etc.  But if you
manually hide cells, data still gets pasted into those hidden cells.
And I believe this behavior is intentional.

My personal take on this is to let remove the dialog, and if necessary
warn the user of overwritten cells in a less intrusive way and inform
the user of the undo option if needed.  I'm thinking of Christoph's blog
entry 

http://luxate.blogspot.com/2010/11/non-modal-messages.html

where he talks about non-modal messages.  This may fit nicely into this
scenario.

Having said that, since we don't have this widget yet in LibreOffice,
I'd say let's change the check box behavior for now, and re-visit this
item if/when we have non-modal message widget available.

Cheers,
Kohei

-- 
Kohei Yoshida, LibreOffice hacker, Calc
<kyoshida at novell.com>