Tag: feature

Updates on various stuff

Kohei Yoshida8 Comments

Ok. Here is some updates on some of the stuff I’ve been doing lately. I picked the ones that are particularly worth mentioning.

Saving documents

There are two changes related to the document-saving functionality that I’d like to mention. The first one is the new icon in the document modified status window. As I blogged before, I had made a minor polish to the existing document modified status window, to show the status graphically instead of simply showing ‘*’ when the document is modified. The only problem was that the icon I used to fill that space was pretty lame and ugly. But thanks to jimmac, we now have a much better icon to show the modified status (see below).
doc-modified

The second thing is with the save icon itself. It has been known to us that some users want the ability to always save the document even when the document is not considered “modified”, while others want the save action disabled when the document is not “modified”. I quote the term modified here because even when the content of the document has not changed, some peripheral data may have changed, such as the zoom level, cursor position, active sheet and so on and so forth. These peripheral data (that we call the “view data”) are still stored with the document, but changes in these data do not set a document modified status. So, if you wanted to save your document with the cursor at a particular location, a certain sheet activated and the zoom level set to a certain level, you had to make a fake change to the content to be able to save the document with the view data change. The solution we had employed previously was to always enable this only for Calc, where the request for this behavior was greatest. However, some users still found it confusing that only Calc enables the save all the time while the rest of the applications didn’t. Also, a lot of users used the save icon itself to check whether their document has been modified or not even in Calc.

So, I’ve decided to make it a configuration option. That way we can keep both camps happy. :-) Here is the new check box to toggle this behavior:
always-save-option

Anyway, I hope some of you guys will find this useful, or at least will not find it annoying.

Performance improvement

pagenation-perf-chart
Another stuff worth mentioning is the improvement I made on Calc’s pagination performance. Pagination refers to the action of calculating appropriate positions to set page borders over the entire sheet based on the current page size, row/column sizes, presence of manual page breaks and several other factors. I had previously worked on optimizing this when we increased Calc’s row limit to 1 million rows (as I also mentioned during my talk in Orvieto), but apparently that optimization still had massive room for improvement; the test document I had took 7 minutes to perform pagination during printing! Granted, the document had 98 pages to print, but I bet that no one wants to wait that long to print even if the document has that many pages.

Long story short, I have reduced the duration from 7 minutes to roughly 35 seconds. Though I’m very happy with the result, it required a large amount of refactoring to get to that point, and when a large amount of code changes, the chance of introducing regressions unfortunately goes up. So, please pay special attention to Calc’s pagination behavior and its handling of row heights, and if you notice any problems, I’d like to hear from you, preferably with a test document or two.

DataPilot field popup window

Last but not least, I’d like to mention this one. The DataPilot field popup window has been in the works for quite some time since 3.1. I have blogged about the initial version and the 2nd incarnation. Now the 3rd incarnation is on the horizon. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So without further ado, let’s take a look at the screenshot:
dp-popup-window
This version has a “toggle all” check box to quickly turn on and off all field members, “select only current” button to only select currently selected member, and “unselect only current” button to select all but the current member. Also not visible on this screenshot is the support for Gnome accessibility framework, which is also new in this version.

So…

These are the highlights of some of the stuff I’ve been doing recently. There are more things on the horizon, so stay tuned.

Automatic decimal place adjustment by column width

Kohei Yoshida5 Comments

Adjusting decimals by column width

Here is what I’m working on at the moment. I’m working on changing Calc’s behavior so that when a value is entered into a cell, and the cell width is not wide enough to show all its significant digits, it will truncate it to fit the available column width when the number format of that cell is General.

Let me demonstrate this using the value of PI entered into a cell. I have made the column wide enough to show all available significant digits of the PI value. This is what it looks like first:
auto-decimal-1

Then I’ve decided that the column is too wide for my liking, and dragged the column border to make it narrower:
auto-decimal-2
Notice that the displayed value now has less digits to fit the new column width. Now, I have decided to make the column even more narrow. See what happens when I do that:
auto-decimal-3
The cell now only displays “3.14”. But as I said, this automatic decimal place adjustment takes place only when the cell’s number format is General. If the number format specifies some fixed decimal places for that cell, Calc won’t adjust decimals automatically, and gladly displays “###” when the value doesn’t fit the current column width.

Default decimal places

Some of you may notice that, using the current version of Calc, a cell with the value of PI only shows 3.14, or typing any number into a cell only shows up to 2 decimal places unless you manually specify decimal places for that cell. That’s because Calc by default only shows 2 decimal places for cells with General number format. You can change that by increasing or decreasing the default number of decimal places in the Options dialog (in the Calculate page). However, that behavior is a bit confusing, especially when you type in a number such as 3.01234 and the cell only displays 3.01 even though there is enough space to show the whole value. That’s another thing I’m working on to change.

The new Calculate page now has an additional check box at the bottom. You can check or uncheck this check box to either limit the number of decimal places for cells with General number format, or leave it unlimited.
auto-decimal-option
What the default behavior should be is still under discussion, but I’m pretty sure that we will agree on leaving it unlimited by default.

HackWeek – Minor polish

Kohei Yoshida3 Comments

As some of us already blogged, the last week was a Hack Week inside Novell, where we the Novell engineers are allowed to work on whatever project we are pleased to work on. Given the opportunity, I decided to work on some UI polish work for OOo that I had always wanted to work on but could not due to other priorities. These are the results of my Hack Week effort.

First, I wanted to implement animated border to outline copied ranges. Currently, copied ranges are outlined with static solid borders, but it was not always obvious to the users what those borders were for. Excel and Gnumeric, for instance, use animated dashed borders, which look more intuitive than static borders to depict copied ranges. Long story short, we now have animated dashed borders in Calc as well.

It’s not obvious in the above screenshot since it’s a static image, but trust me, it does animate. ;-) I consider this a natural extension of the previous work that Jon Pryor did for pasting on ENTER key.

The second work I did was to brush up the document modified status window, to display disk image to indicate whether the document is modified or not. Previously OOo displayed ‘*’ when the current document is modified, or none if it is not modified. I wanted to make it a little fancier so that it would catch more attention of the users. Anyway, here is the result.


This is what the status bar looks like when the document is modified. The image I used here is basically a reduced version of the save icon in Tango icon theme. However, I am not an artist, and I don’t consider this image to be a final version. So the final image is still subject to change without notice.


This is what the status bar looks like when the document is not modified. Basically a black & white version of the document-modified image, with some translucency applied.

That’s all the work I did during Hack Week. I couldn’t spend as much time as I would have liked since I still had to take care of other tasks even during Hack Week, but hopefully you guys like what I did.

CSV import enhancement

Kohei Yoshida5 Comments

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had introduced two new HTML import options to control how numbers in cells are detected & converted during import. I had also hinted at the end of the post that I might add the same import options to the CSV import dialog. I’m writing this post to inform you guys that that’s exactly what I just did.

Here is the new CSV import options dialog:

which highlights the changes I’ve made. At the top of the dialog is the new Language list box, to select what language to use for the import. If it’s set to Default, it uses the language that OOo uses globally. Similar to the HTML import, this option affects how the numbers are parsed, based on the decimal and thousands separators for the selected language, as well as how the special numbers are detected & converted. I’ll talk more on the special number detection later.

In addition to the language option, located in the middle of the dialog are two check boxes to further control how cell values are to be interpreted.

  • Option Quoted field as text, when set, always imports quoted cell values as text, even if they are numbers. This option existed before this change, but was used only for the separator-based CSV imports. It is now used for the fixed width imports as well.
  • Option Detect special numbers, similar to the one in the HTML import option, controls whether or not to detect specially-formatted numbers, such as dates, scientific notations etc. When this option is set, Calc will try to detect special numbers and convert them into appropriate format. When this option is not set, Calc will only convert the simple decimal numbers. By default, this option is not set.

Anyway, that’s all there is to it. Hopefully this will solve, or at least make it easier to handle importing of CSV documents, which was previously hampered by Calc’s aggressive date detection and lack of support for alternative number separators. I doubt that this will make your CSV import experience a perfect one, but it will hopefully make it a much better one.

Multi-range selection copy & paste

Kohei Yoshida15 Comments

New in Go-OO Calc is the ability to copy and paste multi-range selection, that is, you can select separate cell ranges that are not connected with each other, and copy and paste them in one single action. This was not possible previously; when you tried to copy multiple ranges, you would get an error message telling you that copying of multi-range selection is not supported (or something to that effect).

When pasting a multi-range selection, all the copied ranges get consolidated into a single range when pasted into a destination location. For example, copying this multi-range selection

and pasting it into another sheet will paste the data as follows

You can’t just copy a random set of ranges of varying sizes, however. Because the data gets pasted as a single range, all copied ranges must have either equal column size, or equal row size, or else you’ll be greeted with an error message.

HTML import option

Kohei Yoshida6 Comments

What’s new?

I just checked in to the Go-OO master branch an enhancement to Calc’s HTML table import feature. With this enhancement, you can select a custom language to use when you import an HTML table, which affects how the numbers are interpreted during the import.

What’s this good for?

Each language adheres to a different set of conventions, such as date formats, thousands and decimal separators, and other special number formats. Previously, Calc simply used the system’s language setting when importing an HTML in order to decide whether a cell is a nubmer or a text, and if it’s a number, what numbering format to apply. Although you could change the system language in the global options dialog, that was not always convenient especially when all you need to do is quickly import an HTML table with different language conventions, and you don’t want to bother changing the global language setting (and changing it back after the import is done). That’s where this enhancement will come in.

What can you expect with this change?

Well, you’ll get the following dialog

when you are importing an HTML table, to either select the system’s language (Automatic), or a custom language from the list of available languages. Just remember that, if you don’t know or don’t care about what language to choose, select Automatic and move on. If you do care, then select Custom and pick a language from the list.

Special number detection (especially the dates)

There is an additional option below, to toggle automatic number format detection. With this option checked, Calc will try to automatically detect special number formats, such as dates, scientific notations etc. If unchecked, Calc will only detect the simplest numbers i.e. numbers that only consist of digits, decimal separators and thousands separators (and a sign if there is one), while all the other numbers are imported as text. By default, this option is NOT checked, which means Calc will only detect the simple numbers.

BTW, I’m thinking of adding a similar option to the csv import, where automatic date conversion has been quite problematic in the past and driving lots of users crazy. Adding this option also to the csv import would IMO make sense.

Well, this is it. It’s actually a pretty minor enhancement, but I hope someone will find it useful. :-)

Custom sort in DataPilot

Kohei Yoshida

Just checked in this piece to the master branch of the Go-OO repository, to support sorting of DataPilot’s field members using custom sort lists. I’ve extended the popup window I wrote for the hide field members functionality to provide this additional sorting functionality. The result is the following popup window:

In the upper half of the window I’ve added a menu-like control, with the custom sort lists being provided in the submenu. The UI is fully functional, but still a bit rough around the edges. The custom sort list submenu, in particular, may need some additional work to handle a large set of custom sort lists, a sort list that is very long, or stuff like that. But as long as your sort list is in modest size, it should work just fine.

This feature didn’t make it in to 3.1 since we are in a stabilization phase for 3.1. But as soon as we branch master for the stable 3.1 branch, I will enable this feature in the default build in the master branch.

Traversing to precedents and dependents

Kohei Yoshida

Just checked this piece into the master branch of the go-oo repository. It allows traversing to precedents and dependents of a cell by Ctrl-[ and Ctrl-] key strokes, respectively. It is similar in concept to the existing Detective functionality, but while Detective graphically shows the precedents and dependents of a current cell, this new functionality physically moves the cursor to the precedent and dependent cells. Similar functionality already existed in Excel, so this is one of those interoperability features and, for some spreadsheet users, the ability to jump to precedents/dependents is apparently very important for their productivity.

No feature is complete without screenshots. So, here they are. :-)

In the first example, the cell currently selected contains references to three cells and one cell range in its formula expression. I’m showing the precedent traces here just to show their relationship visually.

When you hit Ctrl-[, it highlights all its reference cells (a.k.a precedents) and moves the cursor to the first precedent.

Once the cells are highlighted, you can easily navigate through the highlighted cells by hitting the Enter or Tab key.

There is one caveat. When the expression includes references to cells outside of the current sheet, the ones that are not on the current sheet are ignored. The only exception to this rule is when the first reference points to a cell in another sheet, in which case it jumps to that external-sheet cell while the rest of the references are ignored even if they are on the current sheet. If that reference is in another document (i.e. external reference), it opens that document then sets the cursor to the referenced cell position provided that the document is available at specified location in the file system.

Traversing to dependents also works in a similar fashion. Consider the following example

where current cell is referenced by multiple other cells. Again, I’m showing the dependency traces to display their relationship graphically. When you hit Ctrl-], it highlights all its dependent cells and moves the cursor to the first dependent cell.

Similar to the precedent jump, there is a caveat; when the cell is referenced by cells on multiple different sheets including the current sheet, only those cells on the current sheet are highlighted and the rest are ignored. But unlike the precedent jump, there is no exception to this rule.

That’s it folks! I hope you find this new functionality useful. And as always, please report back any problems you may encounter so that I can fix them. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. :-)

Encrypting an Excel document with password from Calc

Kohei Yoshida1 Comment

The feature of exporting an Excel document encrypted with a password has landed! Now you can save a spreadsheet document as an Excel document with password protection and open it in Excel with that password. The proof is in the following screenshot (the colored emphasis is mine):

Saving a Calc document as Excel with password protection (with encryption)

This feature is now available in the go-oo version of OOo. This also means that, when you edit & save an existing Excel document that has already been encrypted, it will get saved encrypted. Previously when you did this, Calc would save it un-encrypted and you would lose your password protection, which was not good and was a deal breaker for a certain segment of users.

The upstream effort of this feature is underway in the scsheetprotection02 CWS. That CWS also contains another enhancement for sheet and document structure protection (sounds similar but totally unrelated to this document encryption feature), and as soon as I take care of upstreaming that enhancement, I can push the whole CWS for upstream integration. The bad news is that, because that requires a change in the ODF file format & UI change, it will probably take some time before it can be integrated upstream. But I’m making slow but steady progress there, so I’ll keep you guys updated.

Meanwhile, please test the go-oo version for this encryption feature to see if there is any document that Calc fails to encrypt properly (that means Excel can’t open it), and report any bugs to us. I’ve done my own testing, but it’s never as good as many other users testing it. So, thanks!

P.S. Actually this feature has been available for at least two months in the 3.0 branch, but I wanted to see this bug fixed before writing a blog about this so that I could take a pretty screenshot with all texts displayed.

New sheet protection dialog

Kohei Yoshida

I’ve just finished designing a new dialog for Calc’s sheet protection functionality to allow optional sheet protection options. This was actually my first time designing a dialog from scratch instead of modifying an existing one, so I had to dig around and figure out how to add a dialog. It turns out that it is actually very simple once you know what to do. After several hours of creative designing process, I’ve come up with something I can show to people. So here it is:

sheet protection dialog screenshot

One thing to note: obviously this dialog is inspired by the similar functionality offered by Excel, and Excel provides many more options for sheet protection than just the two I’m showing here. The reason I only have two at the moment is because I’ve only implemented support for those two options in Calc core. When we support more options in the core, we can easily add them to the dialog.

This work is on-going in scsheetprotection02 CWS. Aside from the new dialog and sheet protection options, this CWS contains my other work on the binary Excel export encryption as well as sheet and document password interoperability between Excel and Calc. I’m trying to wrap this up, so hopefully I can come up with something that people can try out soon.