Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Calc style management

also sprach Andreas Säger <villeroy@t-online.de> [2015-04-15 17:56 +0200]:
> Don't be too picky. Concentrate on the cells that need constant
> editing. There is nothing wrong when you apply some hard
> attributes to fixed (protected) content.

My experience varies. In one case, for instance, we are preparing
a funding application for a children's theatre to the state and the
document should look consistently formatted (it's been returned to
us before due to formatting inconsistencies… don't ask…). We are
maintaining the document in Git, and even though we all use
Libreoffice 4 on Linux, it's not uncommon that some formatting gets
lost between saving the document on two different computers. I found
that styles mitigate this problem a little bit.

> > Say you have a simple table with row 1 being a "header" row, row
> > 20 a "results" row, and "plain" rows between, column A holding
> > "dates" and column B "percentages".
>
> Blending data, appearance and calculation is the major weak point
> of all spreadsheet tools. Spreadsheets are quick and dirty tools.
> Quick and dirty tools are expert tools and never "fool proof" by
> any means. All the meticulousness invested by millions of "Excel
> experts" is a waste of time. A single copy and paste or the
> unforeseen error of an untrained user may override everything.

I fully agree. And yet, fundamentally, I don't see why this couldn't
be addressed. Data and calculation are perpendicular aspects and you
can think of them as "content" and completely ignore everything
regarding formatting about them. I.e. at the content level, it's
just cell references, data, and formulae.

The problems seems to be on the formatting ("appearance") layer.
From a user's perspective, I would currently conclude that each
cell's appearance depends on (a) the formatting attributes defined
in the (single) style applied to the cell, and (b) the formatting
attributes applied directly to the cell.

The solution IMHO would be to "simply" allow multiple styles to be
applied to each cell, ideally even from different sources. With
this, the appearance would depend on the attributes derived from

  1. styles applied to the column
  2. styles applied to the row
  3. direct formatting applied to the column
  4. direct formatting applied to the row
  5. styles applied to the cell
  6. direct formatting applied to the cell

The order of column-before-row could probably even be made
configurable per-sheet. Other than that, the merging would be
trivial: attributes obtained later in the above series would
override attributes set earlier, and each attribute could either be
set (forced) to on or off, or unset (in which case it's transparent
and gets ignored).



also sprach toki kantoor <toki.kantoor@gmail.com> [2015-04-16 02:19 +0200]:
> Is this semantic markup, or presentation markup, or just sommer
> markup?

I am not entirely sure what you are differentiating between. Some is
semantic (e.g. "dates"), some is presentation (e.g. "header").
I don't know what "sommer markup" is.

> What is the difference in the presentation markup between header
> and date?

Nothing. A date field means the data should be rendered as a date.
A header field means that the font should be e.g. bold on a gray
background. And there can be header-date fields, meaning that data
should be rendered as a date, in bold, and on gray background.

Makes sense?

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