Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 101017
Unusable font color / colour picker in Impress and Calc
Last modified: 2017-05-20 11:11:17 UTC
The font colour/color picker dropdown in Impress and Calc is a) defective and b) inconsistent with the same control in Writer (where the behaviour is as one would expect) - this is compounded by the lack of indication of the current colour choice in the dropdown grid. The behaviour should be as implemented in Writer, or better and the current colour should be clearly highlighted in the dropdown (I put these in the same bug report as I class the bug as a deficiency in the usability i.e. one problem, rather than two functional deficiencies)
I checked with "Ooo 3.1.0 RC1 multilingual version German UI WIN XP: [OOO310m9 (Build 9396)]" and can NOT confirm unusability. I do not remember any problems with 3.0.1. @nohwayjose: May eb you can find out your Platform and OS ? Before you file further issues or post again here, please read our guidelines on <http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/pre_submission.html> and <http://www.openoffice.org/bugs/bug_writing_guidelines.html>, then contribute a clear step by step instruction containing all observations (error messages ...), _every_key_press_and_every_mouse_click_ how to reproduce the problem, and explain why you believe that your results are unexpected. That means (for example): do not write something like „I am not able to ...“, but „6. left mouse click on … expected: …, colour of … changes, … actual: no …., colour remains white, no …
To recreate usable example behaviour. This works as described in Writer, anywhere on a page and in Calc, where the two words are contained in a single cell 1/ Open Writer/Calc and write two words, separated by a space on the Writer page or in a single Calc cell 2/ double click on the first word to select it 3/ press the drop down button for the toolbar colour picker tool and select a colour from the dropdown. This should change the selected text's colour to the colour selected. NB the currently selected colour is not marked or highlighted in any way in the dropdown grid 4/ double click on the second word to select it 4b/ the colour picker tool should still display the colour specified in step 3 despite the selection of different coloured text 5/ press the left half of the colour picker tool to apply the originally specified colour to the newly selected second word too. To recreate the unusable example behaviour. This works as described in Impress, even within the same text area and in Calc, where the two words are in different cells 1/ Open Impress/Calc and write two words, separated by a space in an Impress text area or in two cells in Calc 2/ double click on the first word to select it 3/ press the drop down button for the toolbar colour picker tool and select a colour from the dropdown. This should change the selected text's colour to the colour selected. NB the currently selected colour is not marked or highlighted in any way in the dropdown grid 4/ double click on the second word to select it 4b/ the colour picker tool will now change colour to match the colour of the selected text - this is the problem, in conjunction with the lack of highlighting of the current colour, that renders the Impress picker unusable. 5/ There is no way to re-apply a single colour to many text selections, without memorising which colour in the grid is to be used. I have found the same behaviour to be the case on my work laptop (K)ubuntu -Intrepid Ibex, with OO 2.4. and my home and work desktops, running SuSE 10.3 & 11.1, both with OO 300m15 (as far as I recall - I'm away from work at the moment) I would like to see at least the following three use cases supported consistently Use Case 1 Actor: User of all OO component applications Goal:Set a text colour and apply it repeatedly to selected text Notes: Implementation behaviour should be the same in all OO applications Use Case 2 Actor: User of all OO component applications Goal:Select some text (that has a single colour applied) and use it as a model to apply it to other text Notes: Implementation behaviour should be the same in all OO applications Use Case 3 Actor: User of all OO component applications Goal:Select some text (that has a single colour applied) and copy the colour specification for use elsewhere. Not the colour itself but a composite RGB or CMYK value (+alpha channel, if required) Notes: Implementation behaviour should be the same in all OO applications. General feature note: It would be great to allow different colour models to be used. Like in Inkscape - Indexed Palettes, RGB sliders, HSL sliders, CMYK sliders, Wheel. All of them allow the RGBA value to be copied and/or pasted ps. Thanks for your response about more info in the post but originally, I was getting the report into the system, between meetings and was unable to be very descriptive. I hope that's remedied now. Cheers, Greg
I can understand your point that the Font Color DropDown Menu is not working in the way you expect it. But as long as it does not work in another way as described this is an enhancement. Reassigned.
I disagree with your analysis (so far as I understand it). The inability to perform a task should be classified as a defect. It is impossible to perform the task mentioned in Use Case 1, which by the standard of the correct implementation in Writer, is what the intent of this control was. The other use cases I listed are, I accept, enhancements. If you wish, I will copy those across but I think the original defect stands. I am a usability consultant and I have this chat with developers about why usability fixes are defects, rather than enhancements quite frequently ;o) Cheers, Greg
I believe we should close this issue and also disastrous Issue 10864, what more or less describes problem "Case 1" as a WIN ME (!!) problem. If there isn't already an issue for it, we need a new one simply claiming consistent behavior. I agree the best solution seems to be the WRITER behaviour: if you have to modify background or font color or something similar often in the same way, a "memory" would be fine for all icons with additional picker. It's not user friendly to have different behavior of icons for the same function in the different OOo modules. I see such inconsistences as a DEFECT. I searched IZ for an UI/UI Issue "grant consistent behaviour of icons in all modules" (or similar), but without success. Anybody more smart here? ;-)
Replicated on Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Ooo dev 3.2.0 DEV300m56 (build:9419) I agree with 'nohwayjose' and 'rainerbielefeld': this is behavior inconsistent with what a user expects, inconsistent with comparable products (Microsoft PowerPoint), and inconsistent with other parts of OpenOffice (Writer). This should be classified as a defect. Looking at the comments of linked Issue 10864, 'another_sam' commented that this issue has had 12 duplicates of this issue reported spanning 6 years. I believe this means that this issue should be addressed.
This issue is readily confirmable (see recipe in my post of Sat Apr 11 19:56:50 +0000 2009). Please change status and then fix?!
I didn't change this to RESOLVED. I wanted it to be changed from UNCONFIRMED to NEW, STARTED or REOPENED!
I can reproduce this issue. In Impress just pressing the font color button without using the drop down simply does nothing, so this is a bug.
Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".