At 19:34 11/08/2014 -0700, Tom Williams wrote:
My dad is a long time OpenOffice user and today he called me about
a problem he's having with one of his spreadsheets. Apparently, he
hides rows to reduce the amount of information he sees when he's
looking at the spreadsheet. Today, he needed to change a cell in
one of the hidden rows. When he tried to make a change, he showed
the row but wasn't able to change a cell because something
prevented him from making changes. When he showed the hidden row,
he saw an icon for an anchor and green squares along the perimeter
of the selection of the now shown rows.
He sent the spreadsheet to me and when I open it in LibreOffice
Calc, 4.2.4.2 on Linux, I see the same behavior he describes. From
what I can tell, it looks like Calc converts the hidden row into an
image or graphic of some kind such that when he tries to change it,
he can't because those rows are now part of an image/graphic or
"object" that's embedded in the file.
To hide individual cells it might be easier to grab a graphic, drag
it onto the spreadsheet, perhaps right-click again to "Anchor to" -
"page" and resize to fit the cell(s). It's also probably possible to
put a frame over the cells and then have writing or number in the
frame although it might be difficult to then reach those numbers in
calculations in the rest of the spreadsheet because they wont be
recognised as being in a cell.