Worked for me:
2 Likes
Thanks @mikekaganski. It never worried me as coloured cells were not a huge part of my spreadsheets so I never thought to look for a different answer. I’ll remember that. Cheers, Al
Thanks a lot!
wonderful.
Dear LibreOffice, hiding the grid lines due to background colour is counter-intuitive, confusing, and inconvenient (to me, anyway).
What I would propose is showing the grid lines by default (with the option to hide them in configuration). And, the FIRST time someone selects a background colour, why not put up a prompt? “Show Or Hide grid lines for coloured cells?”, with a radio button, that sets the configuration.
Thank you.
Dear @JamesEadon:
- This is not a place for enhancement requests.
- Changing the default (which would be your request) would assume that more people suffer from this problem, than those who benefit from it. There is no much demand for this - so given that the option exists, why change? And the question - lol, have you an idea how many different options are there in LibreOffice? More than 20 thousands! Imagine every option asking you at the first start?
3 Likes
What about my suggestion, though, the FIRST time you choose a background colour, ever? For a marmite-setting like this, I reckon that my suggestion would be good UX. Else, people have to do what I did, which is hunt through the web to find out how “fix” the “issue” (and this can harm LibreOffice’s reputation, the little things like this). HTH, and apologies for the transgression, sir!
It was in response to that your idea. Every option will find someone, sooner or later, who would think like you - for every single feature. Documentation and sites like this fit better
Most options are not like this outlier. In this case, the default is bizarre, the very opposite of what one would expect. (I never asked Calc to hide the grid!) So, I argue that, your premise, that EVERY option would require a pop-up, is false. Therefore, for cases like this, a one-time pop-up is user-friendly, and needed. For cases where the default is not counter-intuitive, but more for power-users, then, yes, documentation suffices, in such cases, for power users.
In general, if you’re forcing readers to RTFM too much, and then navigate a hard-to-see user-journey path to the actual setting (in a hard-to-find dropdown box!) then the UX is poor.
I was explaining this to the GIMP guys, too, who seem deaf-and-blind to UX common sense. (Compare it to Krita, which has a more standard UX, e.g. for text-editing, for example).
LibreOffice MUST take UX seriously, else, it will always be considered the NOT-user-friendly Office suit.
You can help:
This is my feedback. If your goal is to make LO more user-friendly, then please listen to feedback, instead of saying to frustrated users, “code it yourself”, which won’t happen in 99.9% of cases. It’s the seemingly little things that put people off. LO does the big things reasonably well.
Remember, computers are supposed to make our lives easier, and forcing us to use a search engine to find the answer to something as basic as this, and then navigate a tricky path to the setting, is a major fail, in my book. Most users stubbornly refuse to read documentation. It’s like a phobia.
It’s just a suggestion. There’s no need to get excited about it.
And you are here on a page called “User questions and user answers.”
So if you want something to change, the only solution is to submit a feature request:
How to Report Bugs in LibreOffice
LOL, I’m not wading through all that documentation, just to suggest a fix.
Regarding the issue discussed in this topic, spreadsheet users have long been accustomed to the current grid behavior.
Let’s look at Excel, for example.
Well, I’m suggesting that, the FIRST time you select fill-background, then you ask the user: show or hide the grid (remember my decision)? Because this behaviour is just bizarre. Remember, the grid is there as a guide, not for formatting.
please start to think about your suggestion! in which way should a piece of software decide wether or not was the FIRST TIME somebody selects something? ( which drölfzig conditional context-menus asking about your opinions about what ! )
so - stop complaining, set the option to your needs, and be happy for the next 20 years or at least as long you dont reset your own settings to default!
But, the existence of this page shows that you are forcing people to search for how to fix this error. Just saying, RTFM is the kind of attitude that hinders good UX.
For 99+% of ordinary people, “when I take a paint and a brush, and paint over any grid, I cover the grid”. No, your “it’s bizarre”, “it’s counter-intuitive”, “it’s opposite to what one would expect” is not universal - it just reflects your own acquired knowledge, which you don’t appreciate; every bit of “intuitiveness” is based on your prior experience, and in not something you got with mother’s milk. And further, your position reflects your idea of “what is natural to me, natural to most” bias - hence your “I found other settings not so bizarre, but this was difficult to me - it needs the dialog!!!11”.
I repeat: EVERY SINGLE SETTING in LibreOffice will find its “we need a dialog for that!” proponent. And no, this one isn’t particularly “bizarre”.
But, the grid is a guide, it is not formatting. Why are you erasing the guide by default, when formatting the colour of the cells?
It is irrational to show the grid for empty cells, but not for coloured cells.
Because as soon as you start painting, you explicitly define the look of your spreadsheet. The spreadsheet doesn’t have a “design view” and “result view”, which could differ by “design view shows guides, but result view doesn’t” - so that the author would use design view, and the recipients would use result view … No, there is no such difference. You are working and seeing it, as it will be in the result. That’s the simpler way to do it. It’s natural (in its own way!), and is adopted by 100% of industry.
And the other alternative would be “there is ~no way to cover part of the sheet, and make it not have a grid on screen” (well, one would need to invent much more complex ways to do that - e.g., coloring the grid … which is much more cumbersome to most).
Note by the way, that “it’s a guide” idea itself isn’t natural for most basic users. They will often get confused, when they try to print, and do not see the grid on the printout (many questions like that here on Ask) - so how do you expect them to find your idea of “grid is not covered by background color by default” “natural”?
Now more to the spreadsheet specifics. Spreadsheets are, by design, tools for managing tabular data. Their idea is to provide you an area with cells. It doesn’t enforce borders (because it doesn’t know what size do you need, or maybe several “tables” on that area…), showing you a non-printing grid by default; but it is natural, that when you created a background, you will also add borders. Otherwise - how will you print your tabular data? how will you export it to PDF?
And no, the “not everyone does that” argument doesn’t change the most basic, intended, and natural use case. And for more esoteric ways to use the software, you can’t argue that everyone needs that dialog