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

[Christoph Noack]

Hi all!

Kohei, you asked for some thoughts and I had a look at the issue. But, I
think its better to disclaimer this mail ;-)

Disclaimer 1: I don't know as well what the (more) desired behavior of
this feature is - from a user's point-of-view. So have I'll simply take
into account what is visible at the moment.

Disclaimer 2: This mail might sound a bit negative due to the number of
findings. So please don't get me wrong, we all aim to make LibO better.


Am Freitag, den 08.07.2011, 02:35 -0400 schrieb Kohei Yoshida:
> On Fri, 2011-07-08 at 08:01 +0200, André Schnabel wrote:
[...]
> 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).

Just as a side note: I'm currently a bit unclear whether we balance the
issue of "Excel compatibility" vs. "LibO consistency" when changing
behavior. There have been some changes already that make it harder for
users of other LibO modules to simple re-use their knowledge. What is
the current design direction?

> 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.

Mmh, the question is why there is such a wrong behavior? Although I'm
sure that no implementation is perfect, I'm a bit unsure why this hasn't
been discovered before ...

Since I got confused by this behavior as well, I started some rough
investigation to get an idea about the problem. Here, I talk about the
shipped version of LibreOffice, not the changes introduced by André.

Some questions:
      * How does the new grid behavior relate to the print options? Do
        printed grid and viewable grid behave the same (with regard to
        cell background colors)?
      * Is the grid dependent from the high-contrast mode (e.g. is the
        grid shown always if high-contrast is "on")? So having a "show
        grid every time, no matter what" might a11y relevant.

Besides the issue you've already mentioned (global vs. local settings),
here are some more:
      * It is unclear to the user what is the default grid visibility
        setting if a new sheet is created - at least if we remove the
        global setting (currently you may have turned of the grids in
        all sheets and add another sheet: grid "on").
      * The location of the button seems wrong - it is part of the
        formatting toolbar which (according to the recent documentation)
        "contains basic commands for applying manually formatting."
        Moreover, I don't find any documentation explaining the feature
        and how it relates to the other grid settings.
      * The tooltip is very long and therefore inconsistent to the other
        tooltips for Toolbar elements. Unfortunately, the "Extended
        Help" is missing completely.
      * It seems that there is no equivalent for the switch within the
        remaining UI. Toolbars are usually "shortcuts" to often used
        functionality - they should not contain functionality only
        available there. --> Although access via F6 is generally
        possible, this is somehow an a11y issue.

And one things that I personally think is required to work on: Why is
this a separate button shown per default? Currently, there are some
efforts to reduce the number of less used toolbar items.

A general remark: Independent from why Microsoft enabled this behavior,
it seems purely wrong from a high-level perspective. In the UX world, I
don't know any case where the general visibility of markup elements is
controlled by the formatting of the content. Markups are markups.

Thus, at the moment I don't know why people (knowing Excel) simply
re-color the cell borders (like the background) and they are done. That
would save us a lot of issues.


> > 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?

Looking at the number of issues (which is enormous given the size of the
"feature"), I agree with André. We should decide what we want to have
(generally), rework it, do some more QA here, and enable the
documentation team to create some consistent help.

Addressing single issues doesn't help here that much ... otherwise we
would (e.g.) start to document sub-optimal behavior.

[...]

> 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?

Done :-)

So, Kohei, André, how to continue?

Cheers,
Christoph