Improving Calc Usability

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Monday, 23 Jul 2007

Improving Calc Usability

Frank Loehmann

A new i-team has been founded to improve the usability of OpenOffice.org (OOo) Calc in June 2007. The i-team members are Niklas Nebel, Thomas Benisch, Frank Stecher and me. The goal of that team is to improve the usability of OOo Calc from release to release.

The OOo issue tracking system (IssueZilla) already contains many usability related issues around Calc and there are more input channels beside IssueZilla. So the problem is not to find usability issues to fix but rather to decide which are the most relevant ones with a good relation between effort on the development side and value for the user.

Therefore we have created a list in the wiki to list all these sources (i.e. top voted issues in IssueZilla, customer feedback and other community sides) and started working on these issues for the 2.3 release of OOo.

Furthermore we have added a list of ux issues we want to address for OOo 2.4 to this wiki page last week.

I will post updates on the usability improvements made, if a new version of OOo has been released.

tags: calc openoffice.org spreadsheet usability user-experience

Posted by Frank Loehmann on 23 Jul 2007 | PermaLink |

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Comments:

Hi all, the notice of the creation of this i-team is very interesting. I'm a member of the italian QA group, recently we were discussing also of various issues that were annoying in Calc, about what a hell can be working with merged cells in a complex spreadsheet. This is what happens often in my company, when users ask me why such functionalities that exist in Excel from about ten years, here are still missing. Something is moving on for this old issues? http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2131 http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=8302 Regards.

Posted by flaime on July 24, 2007 at 04:35 PM CEST #

Issue 8302 is seeing progress thanks to contributor mloiseleur.

Posted by Niklas Nebel on July 25, 2007 at 02:34 PM CEST #

It might be worth trawling the self-help forum as well as Issuezilla. If you read through http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=60008 there are real issues there of usability for naive users. And most users are, of course, exactly that.

Posted by Bob Harvey on July 26, 2007 at 01:07 PM CEST #

Here's one pending since Mar06. http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=62989

Posted by Gopal on July 27, 2007 at 10:21 AM CEST #

Can we have macro inbuilt that is used to convert figures into words. This is useful for person like me (running small office) and using OoWriter to create Invoice. I think this can be implemented in OoCalc also so that figures(numbers) in tables of OoCalc file if can be converted into words it would be nice and handy. :) Please do not ask users to install macro. For some its not that easy. How if it comes bundled and can be switched On or Off!

Posted by Prakash K. Pandya on July 31, 2007 at 03:51 PM CEST #

A "copy sheet" function would be very useful to me, and I think to others.

Posted by Jon Mericle on August 02, 2007 at 04:06 PM CEST #

An enhancement which would be very useful, would be to follow the example of Lotus 123 (and all the other applications in SmartSuite) by changing the attributes and formats of text and cells while the dialog is present rather than having to OK the box to see the results - and inevitably opening the dialog box again. This can be very tedious when formatting a spreadsheet for presentation or printing. This feature would very much enhance the usability of all the OpenOffice applications. (Having some of these functions as icons is useful but merely scratches the surface of the problem.)

Posted by Terry on August 06, 2007 at 03:33 PM CEST #