https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79027

--- Comment #12 from Albrecht Müller <[email protected]> ---
Your remark gave me a hint where to look for the language settings. Set the
language to German ==> hyphenation worked.

Therefore I think the issue is not in the functionality itself but in the user
interface. To illustrate this here comes a short story describing my user
experience:

I dont use Calc on a regular basis, had some numbers to calculate and thought,
the best way to this is to create a litte spreadsheet. I needed some
documentation which did not fit in a cell, so I found the word wrap and
hyphenation features. Word wrap worked, but hyphenation did not. Hyphenation
depends on the language, therefore something may be wrong with the language
settings. So I looked into the extras -> language menu. It is roughly the same
as the corresponding menu of the Writer component.  The main difference: the
essential part, that allows you to choose a language, is missing. So I cannot
set the language, all language dependent features are useless. I gave up and
did a manual hyphenation.

After having entered the necessary calculations I had to enter a few of the
results by hand into a program running on another machine.  To make sure I
copied the data correctly I did some calculation by hand using the numbers I
had just entered.  The results did not match. After some double checking of
calculations and numbers I was sure: The numbers I got from Calc were
incorrect.  Toggling autocalc or pressing F9 did not help. Eventually I found a
way to correct the wrong values by doing irrelevant changes to the formulas.
While doing so I tried the undo function. Result: Undoing the changes did not
restore the previous values.

Summary: Hyphenation does not work, they forgot the essential part in the
language settings menu, calculations are wrong and the undo function does not
work. I detected all this in a single simple spreadsheet - what a broken
program!

Thanks to your help I know now how to deal with these issues. I also have an
easy explanation why the two spreadsheeds behave differently: If you create a
spreadsheet using the Windows Explorer you get one where the language of all
cells is set to "None". Therefore hyphenation does not work. If Calc creates a
new spreadsheet it it seems to use the language of the current location, in my
case, German. Therefore hyphenation works.

It took me hours to reach this point.  Proper feedback from the user interface
could render this to a matter of seconds:

1) When I turn hyphenation on I expect to see hyphenation. There may be sound
reasons why this cannot work as expected, e.g. because the language setting
does not support hyphenation. In this case the user interface should give some
feedback that explains the cause of the problem ("Your language setting 'None'
does not support hyphenation.") and provides some hints what to do about ("You
can change the language setting ... there ...").

2) If possible, the user interfaces of the different components of LibreOffice
(Writer, Calc etc.) should work the same way. If you use Writer you can set the
language in  the extra -> language menu. This should work in Calc too. I never
expected to find the language settings at the place where you choose fonts.
Writer keeps font and language settings separate.

3) The menu controlling the calculation modes needs more entries and some
easily reachable description (tooltip?):
3.1) Autocalc - The standard mode. Equivalent to pressing F9 after every 
change of cell content. Is already in the menu.
3.2) F9 - recalculation of all cells that depend of values that have been
changed. This is useful for spreadsheets that contain time consuming
calculations. If you do not want to wait for the the calculations to complete
after you changed some cell values you can turn off autocalc and press F9
whenever you want to see new results. This is also already in the menu.
Unfortunately it does not help if something is wrong with the spreadsheet.
3.3) Hard recalc [Ctrl+Shift+F9]. This is for situations where there are cells
that get not updated by the previous mechanism. Should rebuild  from scratch
the information that tracks changes and recalculate all values. I think this
function is implemented but the menu does not offer it. Therefore it is hard to
find. 
3.4) Very hard recalc. Hard recalc does not always work (see  bug 43003).
Therefore you need a functionality equivalent to saving a spreadsheet,
reloading it and pressing [Ctrl+Shift+F9] (Reloding alone seems not to solve
the problem of cells containing obsolete values). Could be integrated into the 
[Ctrl+Shift+F9] functionality. I see no need to have this as a separate
function if it does not actually overwrite the original file.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
_______________________________________________
Libreoffice-bugs mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice-bugs

Reply via email to