It is exessive data i don’t use. It occupies space which is precious when comments are dense.
I don’t know anything about programming but I imagine the solution as changing some parameter or deleting few lines of code. Some plugin could be useful but i haven’t found what i need in extensions website.
Concerning the remark about programming:
User programming based on the current API wouldn’t lead anywhere. You could delete the information (Author and DateTime), but not save the space used for it. The respective lines would show “(No Author)” and “(No Date)”.
Core programming: The “few lines of code” concerned may be an illusion. There are lots of dependencies concerning the UserInterface, and there are questions concerning compatibility (downward, with Word, …).
A more reasonable (but also surely more complicated) enhancement should be to unify the object classes for annotations and their usage regarding Writer and Calc. Beyond the common name (annotation / comment) they are implemented in completely different ways. The Calc way with specialized shapes could, however, be a next-level option for the textfields used in Writer.
I also would like to second OP’s suggestion, and I’ll shortly try and track down the bug report to up-vote it. (Which will probably require me making another account for a single comment and some contributions. I think that’s 4 I’ve created for OO/LO now. So much for minimizing my online footprint.)
The reason I want to remove the author/date stamp from comments is the same as OP. Clutter.
I use LO for my own personal use. So I have absolutely no need for this information.
It takes up the fist two lines and is in bold. It’s just fugly, and completely misses the point of snappy comments of only a few words.
Where I once had a small comment in an expenses column that said simply:
Mortgage
there is now a massive box that reads:
UNKNOWN AUTHOR, 03/05/2024 13:08
--------
Mortgage
What’s really odd is that I’ve been using LO for a long time now. And the previous version I was using didn’t have this clutter at all. It only changed when I recently updated. Initially I thought the best solution was to simply re-install an earlier version, but some of the bug-fixes etc. might actually be worth having. My point being that as far as I’m concerned, this is not just bug that’s always been there and is complicated to change. It’s a deliberate change that has broken code which previously worked just fine for me.
Edit: I’m referring to Calc. It’s not clear what OP was using. Could it be that this ‘feature’ has always been in Writer, and has recently been merged into Calc? That would explain the way it seems to have been broken.
… and indeed, you use Writer, as the original poster? Or you just jumped into an unrelated issue, with a separate thing introduced in Calc in recent versions? (With tdf#156885 tracking the request to make it configurable.)
EDIT:
It is clear. The question has that in its tags.
Indeed; I failed to spot the tiny ‘writer’ tag directly under the massive title text and jumped straight into reading the posts.
Thanks for the clarification, and I apologise for this mistake.
It seems that certain people want to keep author and date stamp in the comments and other people do not. I am of the latter. Especially, when I export to HTML, I want comments to contain no other information except for the comment itself. So that when a user hovers over a cell (I am talking the exported HTML here), the pop up hover text is the comment text alone. At this point and time (June 2024), I have a burning need to get this feature implemented. So I propose adding options (for calc and writer at minimum) that will allow for hiding/showing author and time stamp. Such options simply cannot be that hard to implement. So I’m off to sign up as a developer for LibreOffice.
I’m with the people that want an option to hide the user/date in comments.
My use-case is a spreadsheet outlining the events of Jesus in the New Testament from the four Gospels.
The Events are listed at the left (rows), and the Gospels are in columns.
Under the column heading of Matthew, for example, will be the verses that apply to that event.
But only the chapter/verse numbers are listed. There is a comment that gives the full text from that passage of the Bible. So you hover over the refs, and get the text.
It looks really unclassy to have my name and a date over top of each Bible reference. I didn’t write the New Testament!
There is a bug report linked in the comment directly above yours. I suggest you add yourself as a CC to be kept up-to-date and to give an indication to developers of the interest in this bug over other bugs they might be considering devoting their time to.
Don’t add a me-too comment though, it fills up the report without additional information. Emotive arguments can be off-putting.
I think that is for Writer.
There is a bugfix in the works for Calc. It will come out in 24.8
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156885
I want to second the above poster. This feature has been requested repeatedly for almost a decade yet the function to remove the date/time stamp from comments has still not been implemented.
As somebody pointed out in another thread on this topic, for those of us who use LO when dealing with sensitive documents such as lawyers, academics, editors, it is imperative that identifying information is not made available.
Can somebody from LO please take charge of this?
Oh so of course those lawyers, academics, and editors have funded that so-much-needed development?
What a remarkably asinine and unhelpful comment.
Oh really?
Whenever I see comments that in a free software, some feature is wanted, I can understand that users might want that, and hope that some kind developer would sometime find it interesting and implement it. But when I read that some missing feature is critical for some business scenario, and that some professionals that use the free software (and obviously get profits using it fir free - which is perfectly normal and great) wait that someone in a community around the free software to “take charge” of the implementation of the so-much-wanted feature, for free, in their free time, to please those who make money from that - that feels unfair. Really. If you have not to pay for a software does not mean that producing it is free for those who do that. So - hiring a developer to make needed changes; or crowdfunding to make that done; or other steps to not only “express wishes”, but to actually fund the work - is really something expected from businesses.
It is rather noble of you to act as a self-appointed LO paladin but you are making a number of assumptions here, not least that myself and presumably other users requesting this feature have not made a financial commitment to LO. I should add that I don’t expect anything in return for my donation, other than a utilizable alternative to MS Office, the very reason I first embraced OO. This particular feature is one that has been requested repeatedly, has been considered as a bug, and has still not been resolved. I can only write for myself but knowing that this feature is available in MS Word I would like to see it finally added to LO so that I can continue to support the Document Foundation and LO.
IMO, I think it’s great that documents have some basic information in them about where they came from. I think if anything, more, not less, information should be added to LO documents, about who wrote them and when. Anonymity is being used in the world to allow people to not be responsible for their actions. To not shine to bright a light on it, anonymity is being used by white radical extremists in the US, New Zealand, and Europe to organize under dark hats to attack and murder innocent people. An attorney does not need to be anonymous, nor an academic, nor an editor. But someone who writes garbage on bathroom walls is an example of ordinary, despicable anonymity.
I probably shouldn’t waste my time responding to what seems like obvious trolling but if for one moment you are actually serious then you have absolutely no idea whatsoever about any of the occupations you’ve just equated with murderous fascists. What you wrote is despicable, adds nothing to the feature request thread, and I’d like to ask you to refrain from commenting further on my request for assistance.
@melevolence: There are a number of issues in your answer here, some of them triggering the harsh responses. So I try to summarize them here:
Your answer is actually about a different issue, only distantly related to the original question. OP has asked for a feature to save space in comment’s area - and the question didn’t actually require to remove sensitive data from the document, only to collapse the unnecessarily used space where it could be used with more value to OP. It’s even not obvious that OP actually has any sensitive info there - it might happen well that OP doesn’t have personal data filled, and so only has that generic “Unknown author” text with date, which is also not needed in OP’s case. But you are talking about anonymizing document.
You use Answer for what is not an answer on an Ask site - i.e., it doesn’t allow OP to solve the problem. This is not a forum - and it’s meant to have a question and answers each aiming to solve it.
Then, you mention “This particular feature is one that has been requested repeatedly, has been considered as a bug” - then please don’t forget to reference those things - e.g., when I read your comment, I wanted to look at those. It’s good to never forget to reference anything you mention in your questions/comments.
Any feature request is only suitable on bug tracker. This is peer-to-peer community help site - so your question is targeted on other users, not to developers here.
And actually saying about donations, you yourself make multiple assumptions - e.g. about your donation helps development, while in reality, donations only help to keep LO free (a really great value! - thank you for the donations you made) - but almost never go to developers (only in form of tenders on very specific tasks from time to time). So donations has ~nothing to do with funding some specific work done (and I personally don’t question the usefulness of your issue).
Is there a feature request on bugzilla ? The search features there are limited and keywords like “hide comment date” yield too many results.
