When entering data, can the cell background be transparent?

I can change the cell background that appears when I’m entering data by setting:

Tools - LibreOffice - Application Colors - Document Background

We enter the data on a background image and it would be very handy if we could have the background transparent. That way, we could still see the data as we type.

Entering historic weather data from US Coast Guard Ships

@Astur OP means the display at the moment of data entry into a cell.

Yes, we don’t want the cell color to be green or white or any other solid color, We want to see the image under the cell while we type. For this example, I set the Document Background to Green. In the case shown, we can’t tell what the value on the image is until we finish entering the data. If we make a mistake, we have to go back and correct the value. If we could see the image as we type, we would be less likely to make an error.

You can set the image one cell up (or to the left) then you can see the content while you write it.

Yes, we could, but we extract the XY postions of the cells on the image and save it in the XML file, which holds the extracted weather and other data. The geometry of the cell is used to train an OCR program which may, eventually, be used to extract the data automatically. If we did input the data that way, we would have to re-align the image with the grid after entering the data, and then offset the image before entering the data for the next image.

Just select the image, Arrow Up × 5, enter the data, select the image (the Navigator, F5, could help here), Arrow Down × 5. But you know better what you need.

Transparency while editing cell content is not possible. If the cell background is transparent then the document background colour is taken for visibility. But I understand the desire in this case here. You could open a feature request / request for enhancement (RFE) in the bug tracker to make that configurable. (which of course doesn’t help you now, but might someone in the future).

Thank you, I’ll do that. We are volunteers from all over the world doing the data extraction, and using tables and frames would be too complicated for most of us. We’ve been doing it this way for about three years now, so we are a patient bunch.

Thanks for submitting tdf#142679.

As a workaround, you could do it in a Writer table with the image set to “wrap through” and positioned in the background.

You might want to consider having the table in a frame (set transparency for the frame to 100%) to allow for easy positioning. At the end of the process, copy the table into Calc for further processing.