Expand formatting and Value highliting options in Calc Guide 6.2

Hi, guys

I keep translating and verifying chapter 14 of Calc Guide 6.2. Two things I want to bring up to your attention (maybe are also carried over to next guides).

1. Expand formatting option. Must restart LibreOffice in order to apply change to it. Also, if data entry in adjacent cells is interrupted with another action in Calc, also the expanding of formatting is interrupted (I do not know if this is a feature or a bug XDXDXD ). These annotations are omitted in the guide an dI think they're important. Firstly, I changed the option without restaring and I almost went crazy because nothing happened.

2. Value highlighting. English guide mentions that logical values and dates are green when this option is enables, but it is not true. In fact, they are blue, because they are numbers, internally. Only results from formulas are green. I checked in a localized (Spanish) version, but I believe it's true for every Calc.

If you think my findings are OK, please confirm. Otherwise I will return the parapgraphs to initial state.

Best regards,
Celia

HI Celia,

With regards to your second point, I agree that Chapter 14 of the Calc Guide is incorrect in this respect. And this error remains in the latest 7.0 version of the document. With View > Value Highlighting selected, logical values and dates are shown in blue in my version of Calc.

I'll come back to you about the first point in due course.

Regards,

Steve

Hi again Celia,

I have looked a little further at the Expand Formatting option.

The first thing to say is that we need to correct the description of this interaction in Chapter 14 of the next English version of the Calc Guide (once we are clear exactly what behaviour is implemented!). As the same text is in the Help files, we will need to change that too.

It is also worth noting that Bug 94499 (first raised in 2015) exists on this function relating to the impact on non-empty cells when the Expand Formatting option is ticked.

With regards to your main point about a restart of LO being required, I did not find that necessary. The following steps showed that selecting the Expand Formatting option certainly had some effect without a restart. Perhaps you could try out these steps and see whether you agree?

1. Open Calc from the Start Center in its default configuration, i.e.
    Expand Formatting unticked.
2. Check that Calc has created a new document named “Untitled 1”.
3. Type any character string into cell A1 (e.g. “abcd”). Type any
    number into cell B1 (e.g. “123.4”). The text in A1 should be left
    justified and the number in B1 should be right justified.
4. Select cell A1 and change the formatting on the cell (via Format >
    Cells) to “Text”. There should be no obvious change visible to the
    contents of cells A1 and B1.
5. Change the value displayed in B1 to something different. The new
    value should be displayed right justified (as you might expect).
6. Go to Tools > Options > LibreOffice Calc > General and tick the
    Expand Formatting option and press OK.
7. Type any character string into cell A10. Type any number into cell
    B10. The text in A10 should be left justified and the number in B10
    should be right justified.
8. Select cell A10 and change the formatting on the cell (via Format >
    Cells) to “Text”. There should be no obvious change visible to the
    contents of cells A10 and B10.
9. Change the value displayed in B10 to something different. The new
    value is displayed left justified, showing that the behaviour
    changes following selection of the Expand Formatting option.

There was no closing of either the document, Calc, or LibreOffice during this process, demonstrating that with my setup, no restart was needed. For the record I am running LO Version 7.0.4.2 (x64) under Windows 10.0.

Regards,

Steve

Hi, Steve!

Glad to read you again! Thanks for your patience.
Somehow I missed your messages on Jan 24th. I was surprised not to find news about this question.
Maybe because I am subscribed to this listing to receive only the digest messages.

I do reviewed your process to check Expand Formatting option. My findings are that there is no need to restart LibreOffice in order to achieve results, as you pointed out. I really don't understand what was preventing me last time for experiencing this behaviour. Even a friend on the Doc team check it along with me and we both needed (at that time) to restart LibreOffice. We're both in Linux… Anyway, I remove the "restarting" note.

However, there's still the need to indicate that this magic stops for the range whenever the user do something else and returns back to range entry. (I still keep this note on Spanish guide).

And we're both OK on Value highlighting correction.

Thanks for all your help!
I'm sure we'll talk later about something else ;D

Celia