Positioning and Resizing of Cell Notes

OpenOffice.org 2.0

Document - ID	Specification Owner	Last Change	Status
	John Marmion	March 10th 2004	Final
Conforms to	StarOffice Specification Workflow v0.1, Aug 2003
Applies to	Calc
Task ID(s)	Issues 25332, 25334, 25335,25336, 25337, 25338
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. But it is important that when notes are activated, that their position should not interfere with the user's ability to see other cell information or other notes. This interference may occur as notes appear now in a fixed position. Thus notes should be freely resizeable and positionable and the new size and position saved for further use. 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	Frank Peters (fpe)	fpe@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	2004-03-13
String Review		

Document Change History

Rev. Level	Change	Initials	Date
1.0			2004-03-10

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
Escher	MS Office Drawing Layer file format

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 not restrict the user to see other cell content or other cell notes simultaneously.

Thus the ability to reposition and/or resize the note layout is a very understandable feature. This ability is consistent with the behaviour of text box drawing objects.

So also is the ability to save the new size and/or position when the note is activated again.

Calc has currently no such feature. Cell notes in Calc have only a fixed position object layout.

To enhance the interoperability with MS Excel in this point, this specification will define the new feature of position and size of Calc cell notes.

Goals

Cell notes should support all size and positioning 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 resize and/or reposition cell notes. The position and size must be retained if the note is hidden and shown again.

This enhancement will allow users to migrate Excel file format documents employing repositioned and or resized notes to Calc.

Technical Dependencies

None.

User Scenarios

An imported Excel file format document may contain re-positioned and/or resized notes. The note may have been re-positioned and/or resized to avoid obscuring another cell or another cell note contents. This position and size stored in the MS Excel file format is currently not acted upon and notes always appear in a fixed position relative to their source cell column and row position.

Attempts to re-position and/or resize a 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 activating the re-positioning and re-sizing handles on the object. A similar experience should be available with a cell Note object.

Competitive Analyses

This exists in competitive products. Users have the ability to position and resize notes and also remember their new position and size 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. So, when Note objects are visible and clicked on, they will have re-positioning and re-sizing handles available as the following diagram illustration 1 shows. The re-positioning and re-sizing handles will be active on the rectangle text box portion only. The tail connector position will not have any re-positioning and/or re-sizing handles activated.

Illustration 1: How to resize and reposition a cell note

In order to position a text box drawing object anywhere in a spreadsheet, the object needs to store the object position and sheet location in the document. From this we can compute the top, bottom, left and right absolute dimensions of a text box rectangle for any sheet. Thus any change in position will allow the same rectangle attributes to be recalculated.

The default tail connection position is currently between the centre left rectangle side and the top right corner of the source cell indicated by the red marker and shown in illustration 1. This tail connection position to the rectangle will be automatic and cannot be manually altered.

The tail connection position changes if you move the note to the left, right, top or bottom of the source cell note. This position is dynamically created and does not need to be stored. The top right hand corner cell source position will always be the same fixed position regardless of the note text position. The connector position to the text box rectangle will move in relation to the location of the text box with respect to the source cell. Thus is best illustrated in illustration 2.

This dynamic tail connector position to the will be automatically created following the re-positioning and/or re-sizing of the note text box.

The excel import filter will use these rectangle dimension values to draw the location of the Note object.

The excel export filter will write out in its file format representation of the the rectangle dimensions.

Similarly, this reading and writing needs to be done for the Calc file format by ensuring that these dimensions are used and saved.

Following a merging of cells which contain notes , a new note position will be calculated and created for the left-most merged cell.

If a Find & Repace operation occurs on a Note text content, the existing position of the note will remain.

Callouts and Note objects are stored in the same object type. This specification is concerned with note objects only.

String list

No new strings.

Tab Order

No changes.

Key Board Shortcuts

None.

Error Conditions

None.

Future Tasks

None.

Legal Issues

None.

Notes

None.

References

http://www.openoffice.org/project/www/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=25332

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Positioning and resizing of cell notes

Page 4

http://specs.openoffice.org/calc/compatibility/AnnotationPosition.sxw

Daniel Rentz

2003-09-24T12:37:38

Matthias Müller-Prove