Formatting of Cell Note Text Box

OpenOffice.org 2.0

Document - ID	Specification Owner	Last Change	Status
	John Marmion	March 11th 2004	Final
Conforms to	StarOffice Specification Workflow v0.1, Aug 2003
Applies to	Calc
Task ID(s)	Issues 26290
Category	Feature

Abstract

Calc allows users to attach notes to individual cells. Notes are very useful for giving more meaning to cell content without putting that information in cells. To support this information it is important that the note text box object is displayed in the best light. A recent enhancement to our notes has meant that text content now supports text formatting. We now need to extend this enhancement to the text box object itself. This means supporting properties such as customization of background colour, transparency, border style, and text alignment. This feature will also increase compatibility with MS Excel Comment handling.

i-Team Members

	Name	E-mail Address
Specification Owner	John Marmion (jm)	jmarmion@openoffice.org
User Experience	Falko Tesch (ft)	ft@openoffice.org
Development	John Marmion (jm)	jmarmion@openoffice.org
Quality Assurance	Oliver Cramer (oc)	oc@openoffice.org
Documentation	Uwe Fischer (ufi)	ufi@openoffice.org

Approved for Implementation

	Approved by	Date
User Experience	Falko Tesch	2004-03-16
Development	John Marmion	2004-03-24
Quality Assurance	Oliver Cramer	2004-03-24
Documentation	Uwe Fischer (ufi)	2004-03-11
String Review		

Document Change History

Rev. Level	Change	Initials	Date
1.0			2004-03-11

Contents

Glossary	1

1	Motivation	1

2	Goals	1

3	Requirements and Dependencies	1

3.1	Requirements	1

3.2	Technical Dependencies	1

4	User Scenarios	1

5	Competitive Analyses	1

6	Detailed Specification	1

6.1	Error Conditions	2

7	Future Tasks	2

8	Legal Issues	2

9	Notes	2

10	References	2

Glossary

Term	Description
Cell note	A text box object attached to a spreadsheet cell.
Text box drawing object	A rectangular object in a document that contains some text.
Edit mode	Special state of a text box (and cell note), that allows editing the text contents. Visualized by a blinking cursor in the text.
Comment	MS Cell Note.

Motivation

Cell notes can be an excellent tool for enhancing the understanding of the contents of a spreadsheet. For example, they can enhance understanding of a formula. But they should also be capable of enhancing or complementing the existing text information by supporting additional text box properties.

Thus we need the ability to support customization of background colour, transparency, border style, and text alignment of our note text box object. This ability is consistent with the behaviour of text box drawing objects and follows on from our recent ability to support text formatting of the text content of the note.

Calc has currently no such feature. Cell notes in Calc have default text box properties and except for one default they which cannot be modified. The one property capable of changing i steh cell background colour. This was introduced as an Accssubility feature and the background colour can be changed globally in the options menu.

To enhance the interoperability with MS Excel in this point, this specification will define the new feature of formatting of Calc cell notes text objects.

Goals

Cell notes should support all text box features of text box drawing objects. This will increase the compatibility when handling documents from other spreadsheet applications.

Ease-of-Use with competitive products. It is mandatory that the users finds a comparable functionality within the same feature as in competitive products.

Requirements and Dependencies

Requirements

This feature will allow users to modify the default text box properties of notes. These properties must be retained if the note is hidden and shown again and if the document is saved and re-opened.

This enhancement will allow users to migrate Excel file format documents employing modification to the existing default comment text box properties to Calc.

Technical Dependencies

None.

User Scenarios

An imported Excel file format document may contain enhanced formatted notes. The note default background colour may have been changed to aid in highlighting the cell note contents. This formatting stored in the MS Excel file format is currently not acted upon and notes always appear in the default background colour. This formatting will be lost when the document is saved. For example if an Excel document has a cell note with a red background colour, we will currently always display this in the default background colour set up in the options which defaults to yellow and when the document is saved to Excel or Calc XML format, the red background colour will be saved as the default option. Thus the original document note text box formatting properties are lost.

Attempts to add further customization to the note once a document is loaded is not possible regardless of the original file format.

Users are familiar with clicking on text box drawing objects and adding additional formatting features to the object using the context menu options. A similar experience should be available with a cell Note object. For example, the experience of changing the formatting properties of individual text boxes is familiar to the user. The user may change the border style sorrounding the text box rectangle through the context menu. This same experience will now be available to individual note text boxes

Competitive Analyses

This exists in competitive products. Users have the ability to enhance the cell note object text box properties and also remember the new properties on reactivation.

Detailed Specification

This feature is already implemented for text box drawing objects. Thus this needs to be extended to include Note text objects which are a specialised case of text box drawing objects.

Individual note text box objects currently support default properties for background colour, transparency, border style and text alignment. These default properties will continue following the implementation of this specification. This change will support the customization of these default properties for individual notes. Changing the global option note background colur will override any individual change. Individual changes will take effect after a global default change. This follows the recent enhancement to support text formatting of the note content. The following diagram illustration 1 shows the ability to change the background colour as well as enhanced text formatting:

Illustration I : formatting of background colour as well as text of cell note object.

All these customizations will be available through the 'Line', 'Area' and 'Text' options of the Context menu. These context menu options will now be active following activation of the cell note text box object. This will be consistent with the behaviour of text box objects.

In order to support this enhancement, these properties must be stored with the cell note. Thus this will involve changes to both the import and export of the XML file and Excel file formats. Thus on import these customizations will be read and applied and on export they will be saved.

String list

No new strings.

Tab Order

No changes.

Key Board Shortcuts

None.

Error Conditions

None.

Future Tasks

Both text boxes and note text boxes should be capable of having styles applied. This would allow easy defaulting of properties. This should be considered for a later date.

Legal Issues

None.

Notes

None.

References

http://www.openoffice.org/project/www/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=26290

OpenOffice.org issue: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=21253

PCD-ID: MSInteroperability-8

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Formatting of cell note text box

Page 4

http://specs.openoffice.org/calc/compatibility/AnnotationFormatting.sxc

Daniel Rentz

2003-09-24T12:37:38

Matthias Müller-Prove