Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Hi guys,

Sorry if it was already discussed.
But I haven't find an answer.

By default OpenOffice calc scrolls by rows. And It's OK, if they are small.
But I have tall rows and scrolling became very hard.

Can I disable this feature (scroll by rows) and scroll smoothly by pixels for example?

Thanks in advance!
And sorry for my English)

KeKc,

As far as I know, this is not possible. But I can offer you a workaround: use rows of standard heights and merge several cells vertically to make a big cell. You can even do it with entire groups of rows. The scrolling will still be by row, using the default height.

squenson,

Thanks for you answer! Soooo fast

It's a pity, that there is no such option
I think it's really useful, don't you think so? Maybe I can submit it for some new release (3.x?) somewhere?

See here: [Tutorial] Reporting bugs.

Then put here the link to the issue.

Why is it so hard? You would surely not have a row that exceeded screen height, and rows scroll one at a time, or several depending upon the Mouse setup. With a Logitech scroll mouse I can press the center roller and then, with slight or greater distance from the screen icon, scroll quickly or slowly, or roll the roller to run up/down the least jump being one row at a time. That is a hardware/operating system setup function, not a spreadsheet problem. I'm curious as to the need to scroll by pixels. It is more natural so far as I can see to scroll by row.

David.

David,

You are right if you are talking about small rows.
But we have some documents in our company with rows even higher then screen size. And this is not my fault
So it's very hard to view the whole row (not speaking about two ) without zooming out.

I don't know how is it going with MS Office, because I'm not using it. But will check KOffice and Koffice2 at home.

See Issue 7722: Cells Columns that are larger than screen jump when scrolling.

You can register and add a vote (up to two) or comment there.

acknak wrote:See Issue 7722: Cells Columns that are larger than screen jump when scrolling.

You can register and add a vote (up to two) or comment there.

Thanks acknak!
I think thread could be closed now..

Thanks everyone and Good luck!

I have the same problem with tall rows. I deal with it by using maximum screen resolution, and scrolling with the scrollbar buttons to move one row at a time, because I need the mouse set to scroll "3 lines" for other applications.

I'm using 1280x1024 on a 17" monitor. I didn't expect it to be clear, because some of the lower ones weren't, but it turned out to be the monitor's native resolution, and by far the sharpest of all the choices. None of my rows are so tall that they wont fit on one screen now.

It is worth getting the latest video card & monitor drivers because higher resolutions are sometimes added later.

Hope this helps.

KeKc wrote:But we have some documents in our company with rows even higher then screen size. And this is not my fault
So it's very hard to view the whole row (not speaking about two ) without zooming out.

In the meantime ... There is 3rd party software available for zooming a section of the screen. One I have used and like will displace the area around the cursor across the full width at the top of the screen, and you can set zoom level. This would allow you to perhaps set the spreadsheet Zoom to allow the screen to just contain the full cell, then browse over it using this software for readability. This is all theoretical since I haven't tried it. It might simply produce larger unreadable chunky text. I don't have the software installed at the moment, but am tempted to give it a try when I return home later today.

This does not meet your immediate needs, but they do seem to be rather specific. It would be an interesting concept though if such browsing as you need was accommodated. That's the thing about programming, trying to please all the people. It's like knowing which words to keep and which to not keep when making an in-program thesaurus; surely not all of them with today's technology.

David.

Dave wrote:

KeKc wrote:But we have some documents in our company with rows even higher then screen size. And this is not my fault
So it's very hard to view the whole row (not speaking about two ) without zooming out.

In the meantime ... There is 3rd party software available for zooming a section of the screen. One I have used and like will displace the area around the cursor across the full width at the top of the screen, and you can set zoom level. This would allow you to perhaps set the spreadsheet Zoom to allow the screen to just contain the full cell, then browse over it using this software for readability. This is all theoretical since I haven't tried it. It might simply produce larger unreadable chunky text. I don't have the software installed at the moment, but am tempted to give it a try when I return home later today.

This does not meet your immediate needs, but they do seem to be rather specific. It would be an interesting concept though if such browsing as you need was accommodated. That's the thing about programming, trying to please all the people. It's like knowing which words to keep and which to not keep when making an in-program thesaurus; surely not all of them with today's technology.

David.

I don't want exactly what I've asked form developers.
I mean I don't need by-pixel scrolling, I need user-friendly way for browsing spreadsheets with large rows.
It could be also not so large rows, but user has low resolution monitor, so the row is larger then screen.

And I also don't think, that by-pixel browsing should be default. It could be option or it could switch to by-pixel browsing in case of large rows.

Sorry to disagree with you, but I do not consider this requirement useful, to the contrary:

1) There is no reason for a row to be higher than the screen height. If this is the case, it means that it contains text, and therefore a word processor is much more adapted in such situation, and provides smooth scrolling. If part of the sheet is calculation, then embed a Calc sheet into a Writer document. Using the wrong tool and requesting it to do what you want is not a sensible approach, use the right software instead.

2) I do not want to see half a row or half a column when I scroll, I always want to see a full cell in the top left corner. I know the programmer would make it a selectable options, but then it will be buried somewhere and hardly anybody would find it.

3) The workaround I described is working quite well. Make a template with the first n columns as merged cells with very large height, and then copy/paste your initial spreadsheet into this template. then you will have a pretty good simulation of smooth scrolling.

4) Excel 2003 has the same behavior, scrolling by entire rows. I do not know for Excel 2007, but someone could test it as it can be downloaded for free for 30 days. And yes, I strongly believe that the success of Calc will be better by being as compatible as possible with Excel.

5) When you know how long it too programmers to move Writer object from the left of the page to the center, then to fix a bug in Calc notes which had more than one line, it seems that programmers have great difficulties to modify the display.

6) There are much more important improvements than this one. For example, processing speed of large spreadsheets is very slow and I would prefer that programmers spend their time there.

2squenson:

I'm not going to "push" this feature.
I have just voted for it, because had met this problem with large rows several time using OpenOffice for several years.
It's very hard to operate with such documents and that's True.

Anyway it's developers wish to implement such feature or to close it. Another deal - if I would be an OpenOffice developer and had such a problem.. But I'm not

ps I have never crated spreadsheets with large rows. Last place they was taken is our entire documents.
pps I would like OOo to be better the MSO, not the same as

I disagree.
Using a spreadshet as database+calcs is legitimate, and the trick of merging cells would break the database, the database can have long text fields.
As an exhample: I'm using calc to write a building metric estimate, where I need to calc size by cost for every kind of work (looong descriptions!).
The proposed soolution is:
standard scrolling by row, if row < window height
switch to scrolling by TEXT row if row => window height

Your proposal is interesting but if you wait for OOo to support this feature to complete your tool, I guess you will be retired before you see it! First, OOo developers do not read this forum, so this is not the right place to post requests. Second, OOo is so complex that the developers can barely cope with the new features and the bugs. Even popular requests like increasing the number of rows are not yet implemented, simply because it is complex.

i'd like to see this feature implemented as well

This thread was from 2009, three years ago!!!

You can now see the content of cells with very long text by using the multi-line entry box for a formula, which is scrollable.

You can change your mouse settings:

Start->Settings->Mouse->Wheel(Roll) set to scrool 1 line at a time instead 3 lines by default

So you can scroll one line even if it small or big. But in other program it will be issue now.