[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Option for gridline display in Calc (fdo#30800)

[Kohei Yoshida]

On Fri, 2011-07-08 at 08:01 +0200, André Schnabel wrote:
> Hi Kohei,

> Well, maybe this is not the best approach to discuss things. I also had
> people who provide support and training to end users. We could continue
> this for a very long time.
> 
> > So, apparently there are users who are confused about this.
> 
> I agree. But I don't think, it is a good solution to just remove an
> option because "some users" are confused and some other users did never
> complain about it . But among those who did never complain are users who
> use the option you want to remove. The simple outcome would be, that
> then you have confused users who request the old option back etc.

I said that just to counter your comments about "not many users". I do
agree however that we should avoid designing things only based on the
user head counts (since that argument will not bear any fruits as you
implied above).

I prefer removing the global setting because I believe it's redundant,
at least internally.  I'll explain more below.

> So - in case you remove the per-application option, how would you
> migrate old settings? Just drop them? Migrate them to per-sheet options?

Migrate them to per-sheet options.  Right now we have two settings to
control visibility of sheet grids, the global one and per-sheet one.
Also more confusing is the fact that, when the global grid visibility is
off, toggling the per-sheet visibility will not do anything.  Now, if we
continue to have these two separate options to control the same
visibility, we would have to define how the behavior should be when the
global and the local settings have different visibility values.
Personally I don't want us to go that route for simple things like grid
visibility.

> I'd somehow prefere a larger rework of the grid options so that users
> are *aware* that something changed and can deal with it.

What kind of larger re-work do you have in mind?

Note that the reason I'm bringing this up is to make us aware of this
and to try to come up with a good UI solution.  My hope is to,
*internally*, we keep only the per-sheet options to keep the
implementation simpler, and introduce some clever UI hack to put things
together nicely.

If some people want to turn on or off grid in all sheets in one step,
that's a legitimate need, and let's add a UI bit for that.  But
internally there is no reason to keep the two separate config options
for this.

Again, my main interest is to get some feedback on what UI change we
should introduce in order to make both camps happy.  Everything else is
just an implementation detail.  And since this change is introduce on
master only currently, if we are to make any changes we should do it
before we release 3.5.

Christoph, any chance you can give us your thoughts?

Kohei

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