Current on-going work

Here is a rough summary of the current status of my pending OO.o work (besides the data pilot work I’ve been doing).

Patches

I usually prefer sending patches when the changes are narrowly focused, or otherwise too small to warrant creating a full CWS. The following are the patches I have sent upstream and still pending for integration.

  • i79808 – This patch suppresses displaying of data validation input message when the message string is empty. So far I have not received any response from upstream. The main motivation of this patch is to improve Excel compatibility, by emulating Excel’s behavior on data validation. Besides it makes no sense to display an empty input message box when there is no message to show (IMHO)!
  • i80448 – This patch allows Excel style hyperlink format to be used in addition to Calc’s own hyperlink format. It’s targeted for 2.4 inclusion (thanks Eike!).
  • i80981 – This patch considerably speeds up loading of a spreadsheet document (Calc or Excel) containing a large number of built-in SEARCH function instances. With my test document, the load time without this patch was roughly 40 seconds, but this patch reduces that down to a few seconds. It’s targeted for 2.4 inclusion (again, thanks to Eike).
  • i81154 – This patch renames the sheet name in hyperlink when importing an Excel document, the same way Calc renames sheet names when they contain a special character that Calc cannot handle. Without this patch, the sheet name within a hyperlink would be left unmodified, thus following that hyperlink would fail when the name of the destination sheet contains a special character. It’s targeted for 2.4 inclusion (hooray Daniel!).

I think these are all I can think of at the moment. There may have been more, but they are probably either already integrated, need more work, block on ODF file format change, or something along those lines.

CWS’es

When the required code change grows to a certain size, I typically create a CWS to make the upstreaming process less painful for the Hamburg folks since reviewing a patch is not an easy task when the size of the patch is big. These are the CWS’es that I have created that are still pending for integration.

  • celltrans02 (completed, pending QA) – Localize the keywords used in the built-in CELL and INFO functions for Hungarian locale. This is for Excel compatibility since Excel localizes said keywords for who knows why. The keywords are already localized for French locale, and that work is already integrated via celltrans01 CWS.
  • autofilter01 (work in progress) – This work is an attempt to add a new multi-selection filter type similar to Microsoft Excel 2007. The internal data structure change is complete, the ODF file format change has been proposed and approved, and the ODF filter code change has been completed so that the new filter is now loaded and saved properly. Work in adding a new autofilter drop-down box for this feature is still in progress.
  • scsheetprotection01 (work in progress) – This work will add sheet protection options so that the user can place some constraints when protecting a sheet. So far, loading the sheet protection options from and saving them to a binary Excel file is complete, and the code change to prohibit selection of protected and/or unprotected cells is complete. What remains to be done is to add a new dialog to allow specifying desired sheet protection options. This effort is primarily for Excel compatibility, but I’m sure some users will appreciate this. :-)

All of these listed efforts are for the most part inspired by our customer requests as well as requests from the community. One exception is the autofilter extension to add a multi-selection filter, since that one is my own pet peeve. And of course, all of this work will all be contributed to the upstream branch under JCA.