Hi All,
Is there a way to make Checkboxes or Options boxes larger? I’ve tried inserting both into my sheet, and they’re so small as to be practically invisible.
Push buttons are easily resizable, but are only momentary, which I assume would take some heavy duty programming to give them “latching” behaviour properties.
Sorry for the beginners questions, and thanks in advance to anyone who can help.
Kind regards.
CT
I will quote myself, even though it is considered immodest.
No, this is not your problem, this is a feature of this particular spreadsheet - it is structured a little differently than Excel or Google Sheets.
Perhaps reviewing the thread this link points to and the discussions surrounding it will help you decide to move away from controls in the sheet when designing your user interface and instead use formatted cells - this will require much less code and extra formatting effort.
Hey @JohnSUN,
Thanks very much for the extremely helpful reply.
I’m very new to LO, so discovering new tricks and limitations all the time.
Since I posted my original question, I have discovered that the label (or text) attached to the checkmark is itself “clickable”, which makes things much more manageable.
But the part you pointed out about an “invisible graphics layer” (to paraphrase you as I understood it) being a less than ideal arrangement when it comes to being associated with a particular cell, I found made perfect sense.
What would be your recommendation for “anchoring or embedding” a straight ahead ON/OFF switch into a cell?
Thanks again for the feedback and link. Much appreciated.
Regards.
CT
Our community has developed several alternative approaches to solving this problem. Two of them, for example, are shown in this discussion. The first example - SumByMarked.ods - uses a simple macro that is triggered by double-clicking on a cell with a checkbox image (cells with checkboxes are marked with a separate style so that the macro does not confuse them with neighboring ones). In the same topic, our respected colleague @Lupp made a reasonable remark that the presence of a macro in a spreadsheet can cause concern among users. Therefore, a little further down, a solution without a macro was proposed - SumByMarkedWithoutMacro.ods. Here, instead of a checkbox, a drop-down list with two values is used. It’s very easy to create such a list -
However, creating checkboxes in a spreadsheet with a macro is not much more difficult - the entire process is described step by step in this message.
As for the question posed in the title of the current discussion, @Regina gave the answer in September 2014: unfortunately the statement ‘will NOT scale’ is true. The checkbox is not drawn by LibreOffice itself, but it is the common checkbox of the operating system
Hi @JohnSUN,
Fantastic info. Thanks so much.
Every time I’ve hit a snag with learning certain aspects of LO, someone as capable as yourself around here, has popped up with a solution and provided yet another rabbit-hole of learning for me to dive down. 
What a shame LO hasn’t got the “cell as checkbox” implementation of Googlesheets you (or was it someone else?) mentioned on one of the other threads!
I was just about to start delving into Macros, so this might be the perfect example case to use and get familiar with.
Thanks again. Much appreciated.
CT
LibreOffice Base has “cells” as calendar controls, time entry boxes, pattern input boxes, as list boxes, combo boxes, check boxes, sliders and option buttons.
Calc is a spreadsheet, very much like Excel. Calc and Excel are no database applications.
To some extent, you may be able to use Excel or Calc as a quick and easy database surrogate for a short time of usage.
You are looking for a user inteface with form controls showing data sets that are related to each other, like input forms connected to a Relational database.
No financial software on (semi-)professional level has ever stored any data on spreadsheets. They all use some kind of database.
Actually, one other thing I meant to ask.
I originally started out this “ON/OFF” switch problem, by using a dropdown, but immediately found them to also be a little small and fiddly.
Is there a way to use a momentary switch (which I can make arbitrarily large) to flip a cell from empty to not empty?
I have a bunch of cells calculating based on a “Master Cell” at the top of my sheets. Currently I have the dependencies setup such that when I empty the master cell, all the dependent cells got to “”.
I would like to be able to provide the end user with a master switch that “empties” the master cell, and also be able to retain the previous value of the cell when it’s switched back on.
Two separate tasks I’m sure, but I thought I’d start with the ON/OFF switch implementation first.
Thanks again for your time.
CT
Your description vaguely resembles what was discussed here. Exactly the opposite, if I understood correctly. There, many separate checkboxes all together turned on the main checkbox, and you want to do the opposite, with one checkbox to temporarily reset or set all subordinate checkboxes? It seems that such a solution was published somewhere here too, you need to look for it.
This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.
Well, at the moment just clearing this one master cell does the job of clearing all the dependent cells through the use of =IF($T$19="", “”… etc. That works beautifully, so being able to elegantly switch this one cell “on and off” would be an achievement for me.
Thanks again.
CT
Sorry, a text description is not enough - we are in different conditions: you see a table, I can only guess about it. It would be easier to conduct a discussion with a sample of the spreassheet.
Great. Fine. I’ll delete/edit it after someone around here tells that jerk Villeroy to stop coming on all my threads and trying make me look like I’m an idiot! I am a self-admitted, unvarnished idiot when it comes to this particular topic, but it’s very ungracious for people with more knowledge, to treat others that way!
I’m sorry for my language, but he’s been doing it consistently for weeks now, and my head blew. Why does he do it??
You’ve been incredibly respectful, and answered all the question (as dumb as they are, I know that) with kindness and patience, and I truly appreciate that. Villeroy would never speak to my face in real life like he does around here, so why does no one pull him up for acting like a jack-ass??
PS, If you’re still interested in helping me after my inexcusable indiscretions above, I will bundle up the sheet and post it here shortly, I understand if you’re not.
Regards.
CT
